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HIGHER LIVING 



BY 



SMITH BAKER, M.D. 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1917 



BH 4 3 



Copyright, 1917 
Sherman, French & Company 



JAN -4 iSi3 



©CI.A479834 



TO 
THE MEMORY OF 

MY MOTHER 

AN INSPIRATION FOR 
SIXTY YEARS 



PREFATORY NOTE 

I feel that this volume offers the legitimate bloom 
of my half-century of professional preparation 
and service with satisfactory fullness. Old friends 
and clients will find what I have so many times said 
to them, perhaps in clearer, more convincing detail 
than ever. New friends and strangers will learn of 
the dominant purpose and the methods that have 
characterized my work, even until now. 

In the spirit of the Ideality that has inspired and 
sustained me through many vicissitudes, I send 
forth this broadening " beam " from out my 
" sphere," and trust it to penetrate and vitalize 
wherever this sort of light is most needed. 

Smith Baker, M.D. 

Camden, N. Y. 
November, 1917. 



CONTENTS 



■IAFTER PAOI 

Introduction iii 

I Hyperions 3 

II The Model Man 11 

III Constructive Anticipation ... 21 

IV Mother and Babe 33 

V The Father and His Babe .... 41 

VI The Newly Born 49 

VII The Young Child's Helpful Activi- 
ties 67 

VIII The Social Nature 83 

IX Expression and Inhibition ... 95 

X The Child's Home Ill 

XI Normal and Abnormal Growth . . 121 

XII Fearing: Lying: Stealing .... 135 

XIII Harmony and Religion . . . .151 

XIV Accident: Disease: and Death . . 167 
XV Death of a Parent 181 

XVI Higher Education 191 

XVII The Great Transformation . . . 203 

XVIII Adolescence 219 

XIX Manliness and Womanliness . . . 237 

XX The Joyous Outlook 257 

XXI The Wedding Day 283 



CHAPTER PAGE 

XXII The Sweet New Life 293 

XXIII Unforeseen Dangers 303 

XXIV Personal Freedom . . . . . . 325 

XXV Helpful Associations 341 

XXVI Our Home 349 

XXVII The Greater Contacts 363 

XXVIII Getting and Spending .... 377 

XXIX As the Years Advance 391 

XXX The Glorious Hope 401 



INTRODUCTION 



Fixing an idea before the mind must lead to some sort 
of expression. theodor ziehen 

The secret of happiness for a refined nature is a just 
estimate of limitations. e. c. steadman 

Let us think quietly, enlarging our stock of true and 
fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or half 
an idea, be running out into the street, and trying to 
make it rule there. Our ideas will, in the end, shape 
the world all the better for maturing a little. 

MATTHEW ARNOLD 

Are you aware that life is very like a railway? One 
gets into deep cuttings and long dark tunnels, where 
one sees nothing and hears twice as much noise as usual, 
and one can't read, and one shuts up the window and 
waits, and then it all comes clear again. Only in life, 
it sometimes feels as if one has to dig the tunnel as he 
goes along, all new for oneself. Get straight on, how- 
ever, and one's sure to come out into a new country, on 
the other side of the hills, sunny and bright. 

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 

The sweet affluence of love and song, 

The rich results of the divine consents 

Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover, 

The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld; 

And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves 

And pirates of the universe, shut out 

Daily to a more thin and outward rind, 

Turn pale and starve. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



INTRODUCTION 

A few years since I was engaged to prepare for 
the periodical Unity (Chicago), a series of articles 
on the general subject Higher Living. 1 Unexpect- 
edly, as the series progressed, I found myself becom- 
ing increasingly interested in the subject and in the 
manner in which it should be considered. Far-reach- 
ing indeed did the issues of all appropriate considera- 
tions promise to be, both as to present need and 
future possibility. Eventually, the topic came to 
appear as one worth every effort, and all the time 
that I could give to it. 

Since then the conviction has continued to 
strengthen, that never before in the world's history 
has it been more absolutely incumbent on everyone 
to do what he can to further the development of 
Higher Living, than now. In fact, the more closely 
and frequently one studies one's own needs, or simi- 
larly studies the needs of other people, the stronger 
this conviction must grow, and the more imperative 
must be the impulse to lend a hand, on the part of 
everyone susceptible to this sort of " stirring of 
soul." 

For it must be noted that in every walk in life 
there is surely needed men and women who can regu- 
larly eat and digest everything requisite for better- 

i Permission to make needful use of these articles is grate- 
fully acknowledged. 

iii 



iv INTRODUCTION 

ment of health endurance, who can sleep sweetly and 
recuperatively, and who can handle the tools requisite 
for every situation with adequate skill and strength, 
— who are, in fact, so constituted as to be physically 
energetic and resisting and enduring enough for 
every ordinary shock or stress that modern life de- 
mands of them. Business men certainly need to have 
this to meet the demands of complex business trans- 
actions, which are much more serious users-up of the 
finer physical vitality than the simpler ones of the 
past ever were. Professional people need it, that 
they may not only do their work better, but that they 
may the better radiate its real value and use to those 
they wittingly or unwittingly guide. Tradesmen 
need it, that they may have the clear vision and 
firm confidence that robust health naturally provides. 
Moralists and reformers and leaders all need it, that 
their efforts to make the world better may not be 
swamped in a mush of weak sentiment, and lead to 
harmful hindrance rather than to encouraging good. 
All these need to have ruddy cheeks and lips, strong 
arms and legs, well coordinated hands and nimble 
feet, — especially in these days of exorbitant demand 
and yet of degenerate weakness. Full and sym- 
metrical development of physique should therefore 
be considered the universal foundation of every sys- 
tem of human betterment. 

Again, it must be noted that the growth of a mind, 
which shall eventually be able to control and direct 
the body as it should, is not as yet fully provided for, 
and that this must be the next step, even though it 
does seem that, with all the educational " principles " 
and " systems " already so universally and so long 



INTRODUCTION v 

in vogue, it were quite superfluous to say another 
word on this part of the subject. Yet it must be 
acknowledged, none the less, that nothing like an 
ideal education of the mind, either theoretical or 
practical, has yet been devised. The old psychol- 
ogy, with its partisan disregard for the underlying 
body and its functions, and with its almost exclu- 
sively subjective definitions and classifications, still 
too widely prevails. The coming educational seer 
must look to something more comprehensive than has 
as yet been reached, if the strict and efficient develop- 
ment of the mind itself, to say nothing of the co- 
ordinating of mental with physical activity, of indi- 
vidual with social effort, and of the industrial and 
practical with the theoretical academic learning and 
discipline, is ever to be realized. 

Nor should we fail to note that as yet the notion of 
a better body and mind and a better functioning of 
both these side by side, is not everywhere accepted 
as being most scientifically promising, or most neces- 
sary to insure a better Life of the Spirit than the 
world has ever yet experienced. Usually, heretofore, 
the spiritual life has been thought to be rather ex- 
clusively dependent upon sources that transcend all 
natural origins and laws and activities, and conse- 
quently to be a life that is absolutely exceptional, if 
not unique. Moreover, it has been generally believed 
that unless this transcendental Source graciously of 
its own accord floods the soul with its specific light, 
and likewise affords unusual capacities for receiving 
this light as well as unusual abilities for profiting by 
it, the true spiritual life is not quite possible, or must 
soon die out if for any reason the transcendental 



vi INTRODUCTION 

light is withheld. The Life of the Spirit has thus 
been systematically divorced from the life of the nat- 
ural body and the natural mind, and in these days 
of a better understanding of the close relationship 
of body, mind and spirit, at least during our earthly 
lives, this unwarranted divorcement has not only 
come to be confusing and forbidding and emasculat- 
ing, but to be recognized as in need of comprehensive 
correction, as well. No wonder that in so many 
minds the so-called " Christian revelation " is allowed 
slowly to give way, either to stolid indifference, or 
to still more stolid denial, or else to something like 
the Buddhism that teaches so exclusively that, " By 
one's self the evil is done, by one's self one suffers ; 
by one's self evil is left undone; by one's self one is 
purified," and to feel themselves doubly assured as 
they read further that " No God can turn into defeat 
the victory of a man who has conquered himself . . . 
holding fast to the truth as a refuge, looking not to 
any one but himself." Indeed it may be safely prem- 
ised that from now on the number of people whose 
Spiritual Life will thus be founded more exclusively 
than heretofore on the natural experiences of their 
own selves, and a natural interpretation of the ideas 
and hints that are derived from close and accurate 
investigation of the entire field of natural phenomena, 
and not so exclusively on so-called " miraculous " 
revelations, except, perchance, as these are thought 
to corroborate what is otherwise discovered, must 
grow rapidly. Everything in the intelligible uni- 
verse looks to the conclusion that, after all, the real 
Spiritual Life, the life of permanent and progressive 
betterment and achievement, is not to be realized so 



INTRODUCTION vii 

fully and accurately in some supernatural other 
world, as in the best developed bodies coupled with 
the most perfect minds and the most loving and hope- 
ful hearts, as these are even now possible in this pres- 
ent world of nature and of art. 

Whether this will be so or not, is perhaps as yet 
of speculative worth chiefly. But the call to make 
human life in this world happier, more useful and 
brighter, prospectively, is real and imperative and 
growing with every advance toward betterment. 
" Shall the predatory, deceptive, destructive instincts 
and the superstitious and hypocritical instincts con- 
tinue longer to rule so dominantly the world's life 
and its activity? " is now asked, " or, shall the in- 
stinct to discover and know the whole truth, to fol- 
low just ideals, to ascend higher and higher in the 
scale of development, increasingly and everywhere 
prevail, instead? " Which of these series of in- 
stincts shall be most cultivated and followed, and how 
shall the problems concerning humanity's well-being 
or ill-being be finally solved? — these are the ques- 
tions that should be asked, even as they are now being 
asked, by everyone who thinks of anything like intel- 
ligent duty towards his fellows, — asked until they 
can be answered in such a way that everyone instead 
of certain privileged ones will be equally benefited 
and satisfied. 

The moment one seriously thinks of this higher 
duty towards his fellows, one cannot escape thinking 
with equal seriousness of the realizations of what 
goes to make up the truly desirable fruitage of the 
spirit, and to ask most relevantly, What indeed shall 
be said of our present and prospective clarity of out- 



viii INTRODUCTION 

look and anticipation? what of our hope, and faith, 
and patience, and benevolence, and love, and all the 
rest? Have we no "open door" here, yet to be 
entered? Is all attained that is possible in this re- 
spect? Have we no further revelations to look for? 
Do we really know sufficiently of the " law," the 
" grace," the " promise," the " sacrifice," the " resur- 
rection," and all else needful for the promotion of the 
true life of reasonable duty and spiritual bloom? 
The most casual glance at life in general, and at the 
agencies for promoting the highest ethical and spirit- 
ual prosperity in particular, does not discover this to 
be quite satisfactorily so, at least very frequently or 
very widely. Here, surely, is a field that remains 
open for the modern man and woman to enter upon 
to find out the still better way, a field in which even 
the best tillers and reapers may yet find themselves 
needing a much better furnishing of body and mind 
than they have heretofore thought needful. It is 
a field moreover in which all the faith and strength 
and acumen and determination of a fully endowed 
and instructed and disciplined human being has sel- 
dom if ever been enlisted. What glorious prospect 
and hope is there not here for every properly en- 
dowed and instructed and disciplined worker; what 
promise of discovery and harvest, what gleanings by 
the way! Ah, all the goodly fellowship of dutiful 
and devoted workers will most certainly here find 
the acreage broad enough, and the tillage difficult 
enough ; yet also will find the spring-light flooding it 
more and more, the summer growth encouraging, 
and the Harvest-home unprecedented, in the end. 
So, then, let our definition of the betterment that 



INTRODUCTION ix 

shall result in universal Higher Living be something 
like this, namely : That kind of intelligent cultivation 
which shall manifest progressively a more compre- 
hensive respect for every structure and function of 
the human being, whether bodily, mental or spirit- 
ual, and shall intelligently further the best interests 
of all these together, and in every way feasible at the 
time. With this definition in mind, it is easy to see 
that the body and all its activities and possibilities 
must come to be much more accurately understood 
and cultivated than now; that the mind itself and 
its expansibilities shall be more thoroughly furnished 
and disciplined; and that the soul and its high as- 
pirations and needs shall also be more and more fully 
appreciated and encouraged and provided for, than 
ever ; — that, in fact, no one of these several con- 
stituents shall be partially judged or given undue 
attention, especially to the depreciation and neglect 
of the others. In the economy of the individual as 
well as of the community, it should be estimated that 
the foot is equal to the brain, the stomach to the 
eye, the heart to the nerves, the body to the soul, and 
every function and faculty of any part of equal 
worth in its place. With a proper appreciation of 
this important estimation, and a resolute direction 
of energy in accordance therewith, there must neces- 
sarily result the progressive betterment that shall 
everywhere express itself effectively in Higher Living. 
Surely then, here is a direction in which everyone 
can do something that will prove very " practical " 
in enhancing the essential value of his own life, as 
well as that of the lives of everyone else, now and 
hereafter. Each and every one can thus do some- 



x INTRODUCTION 

thing to increase the attractiveness and the useful- 
ness of all those elements of the Higher Life, — intel- 
ligence, patience, sturdiness for the right, apprecia- 
tion and wholesome worship of beauty and goodness, 
kindliness of spirit, gentleness of action, sympathetic 
fellowship for all, radiant hope and inspiring aspira- 
tion, daily manifestation of the best within us — in 
fact, of all those noblest characteristics, which of 
themselves and by their exercise assure their eternal 
worth; and, in doing this feel also that he is indeed 
fulfilling the highest duty yet known to man, either 
to himself, or to the Great Source whence he and all 
else have originally come. Such an obedience to the 
impulse to betterment will surely bring its due re- 
ward, in measure incalculable and in satisfaction 
unalloyed. 



CHAPTER I 
HYPERIONS 



But breathe the air 
Of mountains, and their inapproachable summits 
Will lift thee to the level of themselves. 

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW 

A mortal may fancy himself treading the upper alti- 
tudes, only to discover that the baser forces in the brain 
are working independently of the will. 

GERTRUDE ATHERTON 

We want the hero's heart, but are aggrieved at the 
battle that proves it; we want patience, but are critical 
of the suffering that evokes it; we want sympathy, but 
not the kind of world in which it is possible. 

A. w. JACKSON 

It is amidst the perpetual and inextricable combination 
of the limited with the illimitable, of the definite with 
the indefinite, in every sphere of human existence, that 
the free unfolding of man's nature, his liberty of soul, 
becomes possible; and this, according to God's will as 
well as according to man's own inner God-given law; 
and, in harmony with the general unity of living nature. 

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL 

Use all your powers: that is all the obedience which 
the universe exacts. william james 



CHAPTER I 
HYPERIONS 

One night, in midsummer, I stepped out into the 
unvitiated darkness of a far-up mountain side. As 
I gazed into the heavens they seemed slowly to close 
down upon me, and with a fascination that impelled 
repeated movements to meet them ; yet they would 
never come quite near enough for me to pluck the 
stars, seemingly so near at hand! Suddenly the 
ground slightly trembled and then crumbled almost 
beneath my feet; and then there was noisy confusion 
far below. I recoiled with a sad sense of both failure 
and fright. In the morning I found that one step 
more, and I would have fallen hundreds of feet to in- 
evitable destruction! 

A rapidly increasing number of people, restless in 
the light as yet afforded them, venture longingly 
forth into the unstimulating quiet of the mystical 
night. For, with them, 

" Beneath the calm, within the light, 
A hid unruly appetite 
Of swifter life, a surer hope, 
Strains every sense to larger scope, 
Impatient to anticipate 
The halting steps of aged Fate "; 

and the impatient yearning will not be restrained, 
even until an ever deeper, more impressive ideal, still, 
promises the fullest realization, later on. 

3 



4 HIGHER LIVING 

As they do this, however, they often forget the 
weariness and strife and pain of the past days, be- 
come fascinated with the openings through which 
stream the light from heavenly places, and their 
spirits seem invited to a realization, which, if ever 
to be, is certainly now but just beyond their safe 
reach. Remembering Plotinus, and Tauler, and 
Guyon, or their like, they, too, 

" Pray for a beam 
Out of that sphere/' 

— a beam which shall be as strength and rest and sat- 
isfaction, world without end. And so they impul- 
sively reach up, and step forward, and often would 
almost realize, were it not that their feet rest on un- 
steadiness only; and so they recoil lest they irrevo- 
cably fall. Stars cannot be plucked except we climb 
to them on something which surely supports us ! 

Philosophic idealism, constructive though it may 
be, and spiritual exaltation, blessed as it undoubtedly 
is, are indeed universally to be reached for as among 
the richest gatherings of life ; but only as an experi- 
ence proven to be within safe reach of everyone. It 
is well sometimes to be able to say, " My God is all," 
or to yield to the Higher Self an unquestioned obedi- 
ence. Indeed, such a feeling of exalted yielding of 
self might be allowed to qualify continuously one's 
every moment and undertaking, with much good, pos- 
sibly, to result. But only the kind of affirmation of 
self that in turn compels intelligent obedience, is, 
day by day, the firmest basis of permanent self- 
realization and ultimate satisfaction. Not only are 
we to invite heavenly influences in order that our 



HYPERIONS 5 

higher life may prosper, but also are we properly 
to make use of every kind of earthly influence, as 
the pledge of our sincerity. Hitching wagons to 
stars and forgetting the patient oxen that possess 
so many elements of strength and efficiency, does not 
manifest the thoroughgoing good sense upon which 
all truly cultural aspirations are safely founded. 
Humanity needs the " feet of clay," as well as the 
spirit of the stars — the alluvial sustaining of the 
valleys, as well as the lifting air of the mountains. 

Were the question, Who would be an Hyperion? 
— a child of the light, the good, the strong — clearly 
put to civilized people universally, almost unani- 
mous would be the answer, " I, of course ! " So in- 
born is this feeling, no one is ever so high that vistas 
of brighter perspective, spheres of greater achieve- 
ment, states of truer bliss, are not glimpsed fre- 
quently enough to warrant both it and the resulting 
conviction which so very naturally ensues; nor are 
there many quite so low, so spent or so oppressed, 
that there do not come to them also dreams of up- 
ward and outward betterment, which not only make 
them feel worthy of these, but more or less ready 
to hope that eventually they will be able to justify 
the corresponding complacency sometimes felt. 
"More light!" "More light!" is not the cry of 
genius alone; it is the wail of common humanity. 
Greater strength and purer good are parts of a com- 
mon demand, which, no matter how vague its voice, 
yet makes itself known upon occasion. We every- 
where and all think, at least, that we really want to 
live in the light and be transparently receptive to 
its cheering influences. We would be able also to im- 



6 HIGHER LIVING 

press some portions of the world, if ever so slightly, 
with the truer nerve and the steadier hand that would 
prove an earnest of our sincerity in this. We actu- 
ally want heaven — of nothing else, are we quite so 
sure! 

Yet, on a certain illuminating day, a physician, 
who for a score of years had answered every call and 
done whatever he could to alleviate human distress, 
was asked, " What is the chief lesson of it all for 
you? " To which the answer was neither quickly 
formulated nor readily given. The good man 
thought back, as he had an assured right to, upon 
all the kindnesses, the affectionate tokens, the joy- 
ous friendlinesses, the manifold appreciations, so 
vividly and so gratefully remembered, that had 
marked his professional lifeway ; but he thought, too, 
of so much that was quite the opposite of this. All 
his thinking, however, did not at once give the clue 
to what he was sure he wished to say. Finally, a 
glance at his books of record seemed to rapidly pre- 
cipitate the thought needed. Then his face grew, 
not bright and satisfied, but pathetic in its repressed 
pain and sorrow, as he said : " The chief lesson to me 
is, that the large majority of people are not alto- 
gether truthful when they claim they want to be 
healthy. Over and over again," he continued, after 
another period of reflection, " have I seen that, when 
under stress of weariness or lack of time, I have sim- 
ply prescribed for people's ailments perfunctorily, 
but probably with due conventional impressiveness, 
not only have my services been acceptable, but satis- 
factory to an unusual and praised degree. But, on 
the other hand, have I seen, also, that when I have 



HYPERIONS 7 

taken time carefully to gather up every thread of 
relevant history, investigate every region and symp- 
tom carefully, and then have fully considered every 
point of the knowledge thus gained, all with a view to 
saying the word which should teach a better, safer 
way of living, I have been met with suggestions of 
professional weakness, or worse, lack of skill — and 
this, I am sorry to say, in very many instances, in- 
deed. So I am forced to believe that many people do 
not really want to be healthier," he affirmed, with 
emphasis. " They more truly like instead to please 
themselves, even recklessly, and then try to appease 
their consciences or superstitions by glibly but in- 
sincerely talking about their ' troubles,' and by seek- 
ing indiscriminately every sort of means of so-called 
' cure,' possible to be had." 

It seems somewhat painfully true that, if people 
could only 

" Be carried to the skies 
On flowery beds of ease," 

or if they could have light and strength and good- 
ness come to them in dulcet portions only or perhaps 
have them injected once for all during some anaes- 
thetic moment ; or if they could only get the very best 
for the very least, or possibly for the worst — then, 
self-sufficiently would they think themselves to be 
Hyperions in fact, as well as in aspiration. But, 
actually and determinedly to use the necessary and 
commonplace hammer and broom until the muscles 
grow strong; to select such courses of resistance as 
require active overcoming; or resolutely to open the 
mind and heart, even with utmost sturdiness, if 



g HIGHER LIVING 

need be, so that the light of instructed sense may 
really penetrate and vitalize ; — this, how few are 
really minded to do? Yet it is this — just this — 
which justifies any sort of pretension to having or 
sincerely desiring those interests that are centered 
in light, or strength, or goodness. When we say we 
want to be wiser, or stronger, or better, it would 
be a mark of good sense at once to enter upon some 
corresponding course of life, which, if persisted in, 
will realize not only the high desire, but affirm an un- 
mistakable sincerity, both in purpose and effort. To 
talk of health, happiness and prosperity, to read 
about them, to long for them, to dream over possi- 
bilities, and not actively to energize one's self in the 
direction clearly pointed out by accurate science and 
common sense, is not the kind of ground for expect- 
ancy that will ever prove realizable, at all. Every 
time, 

" Earth gets its price for what earth gives us," 

and the only reliable assurance of fullest realization 
that we can have, is ever higher and higher living, 
persisted in both for ourselves and for all the gen- 
erations to come. 



CHAPTER II 
THE MODEL MAN 



I wish men and women, every soul of them, would try 
to make the most of themselves, and see what would come 

Of that. C. D. WARNER 

The very essence of culture is shaking off the night- 
mare of self-consciousness and self-absorption and at- 
taining a sort of Christian Nirvana — lost in the great 
whole of humanity. e. r. sill 

The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh 
gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with 
a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and 
other people. Like certain chintzes, calicoes and gin- 
ghams, they show finely in their first newness, but can't 
stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect 
after washing day. Nathaniel hawthorne 

You cannot buy the wares of knowledge and carry them 
away in another vessel; when you have paid for them 
you must receive them into the soul and go your way, 
either greatly harmed or greatly benefited. socrates 

The blissful development of the human being which 
leads to perfection and completion, and the fitting lines 
for the attainment of his destiny and thus for the attain- 
ment by effort of the genuine joy and true peace of life, 
depend alone on the correct comprehension of man, even 
as a child, in respect to his nature as well as his rela- 
tions. FREDERICK FROEBEL 



/ 

/ 



CHAPTER II 
THE MODEL MAN 

The central personality of modern thought — its 
vital nucleus and the inspiration of its best directed 
energy — is undoubtedly Jesus of Nazareth. As 
heretofore, so now, when compared with every one 
else, he stands conspicuously in the front. As a 
life-motive, his words and spirit are still distinctive 
enough to amply sustain the most exalted character- 
ization. How he was born and nurtured; what he 
said and did; all the influence of his life and death; 
are things whose distinctive value is appreciated, as 
well by scientists as by religionists and philosophers. 
To us all, he is the deep revelator, the wise teacher 
and inspired, and the great promise and surety of a 
better life, both in the present and the future. To 
him, we all bow our heads in tenderest respect and 
in more or less filial devotion. We claim Him as 
our Model Man — unique and worthy ; and we gladly 
crown Him Lord of all! 

When, however, we come to look closely at this 
Royal Personage, in just what does his distinction 
really consist? We see at once and clearly that he 
was a product of such racial and ancestral antece- 
dents, that in his body, his mind and his disposition, 
there were summations of the very best that human 
life could then produce. In his body there were no 

11 



12 HIGHER LIVING 

observable flaws, — he was ruddy and chief among ten 
thousand; yet there were necessarily many of the 
essential weaknesses inherent in all flesh. His men- 
tality was of such a deep and comprehensive order 
that he has ever since been most acceptable to multi- 
tudes, as the chief embodiment of model and spiritual 
universality. Yet some of his thoughts nevertheless 
reveal suggestions of certain of the limitations and 
localizations common to mankind everywhere. And 
his disposition, so sweet and tender that he has been 
looked upon as indeed the spiritual light of the 
world, had yet in it certain elements that constrained 
him betimes energetically to pronounce woe upon his 
enemies, and to scourge them with an unsparing 
hand. Human, at any rate, he was ; but in what a 
model sense, nineteen centuries of remembrance amply 
testify ; and this, because he had body, mind and 
spirit, which were persistently held in an equilibrium 
that was as exact as it was comprehensive. 

But he is said to have been more than ordinarily 
human, and we all feel this to have been at least 
exceptionally true. If so, in just what did the un- 
usual quality consist? The answer commonly has 
been, and is : His extra human quality was derived 
from " The supernatural and immaculate concep- 
tion of his grandmother combined with the virginity 
of his mother. In this he was surely more than hu- 
man, in fact, was truly divine." Yet, we are bound 
to say, in spite of the wide acceptance of this, that 
neither science, nor common observation, nor any 
sort of legitimate theology, can thus find a stable and 
sufficient ground for a satisfactory accounting for 
the full nature of the Son of Man. Strictly speak- 



THE MODEL MAN 13 

ing, such an unnatural progeniture would have made 
him divine simply and to just the extent that the 
first unicellular organism was divine, and to no other 
extent, whatever. At best, it would have simply 
started him on his physical life-way; after which, at 
every step further, all would have had to depend upon 
ordinary natural processes, and been subject to the 
thousand arrests and perversions of growth that are 
owing to accidents, disease, or failure, any one of 
which would have been quite sufficient to frustrate 
the final outcome in the development of an adult God- 
in-manhood. The fact is, the ordinary explanation 
of the divinity of Jesus is in no way entirely or 
chiefly sufficient for the requirements of his so-called 
M divine " life. To be satisfactory the explanation 
must be at least as real and as ideal as the manifest- 
ing Life itself. 

Now certain exclusively ideal processes were neces- 
sary in the production of the acknowledged fact of 
the divinity of Jesus; and it is not skepticism, or in- 
fidelity, or even cold rationalism, accurately to con- 
sider and value these in our definition and evalua- 
tion of the divinity of Jesus, even if certain of our 
predilections are disturbed in so doing. For in- 
stance, it was absolutely necessary that Jesus should 
have had given him by his progenitors a body which 
was not diseased, or fated with such predispositions 
to disease as would have resulted in his breaking 
down or seriously deviating from the norm, prema- 
turely. " He was made in the likeness of men," and 
had to go through ante-natality, infancy, childhood, 
and adolescence, with all the human liabilities and 
stresses and commotions incident thereto. It was 



14. HIGHER LIVING 

necessary, absolutely, that his body should be fur- 
nished regularly with adequate nourishment, and 
should be capable of the natural growth dependent 
upon this, as it has ever been, and ever is, and ever 
will be, for other human beings, as well. In giving 
him this body and sustaining it, his parents, not one 
but both of them, as was proved by subsequent events, 
had utmost need to be thoroughly of the highest 
development possible for human beings then to be. 
Without this, the quality of divinity for him or for 
anyone else was and is simply impossible. 

Again, Jesus had the common need of a well-in- 
structed, well-disciplined mind, in order to make 
even his bodily powers efficient. At his mother's 
knee he grew in stature and wisdom. So far as the 
pedagogy of his time could go, he was given and did 
receive its full benefits dutifully and fully. In this, 
there was again a human as well as divine devotion 
to parental duty that seems to have been ideal beyond 
criticism, at the time. For the son was taught to 
obey, to work, to know, and to guide himself, in all- 
sufficient ways. In doing this, the natural concep- 
tion and nourishment of a fully-potentialed body 
was supplemented by the equally natural endowment 
of the highest mental prepossessions and develop- 
ments which Mary and Joseph, through their racial 
and family inheritances, were the fortunate owners 
of, and were thus able to provide their child. Had 
they failed in this, no mere " immaculate conception " 
and " virginity " could have sufficed to account for 
the divineness manifested in their son's subsequent 
life. 

Even more interesting and more important still, 



THE MODEL MAN 15 

was the divinity of the purely ideal spiritual con- 
ceptions, which in Jesus' life bore unprecedented 
fruit for humanity. Here, certainly, was manifested 
such convincing evidence of endowment from his di- 
vine Father, and such full receptivity of the divine 
nature, that when the time came no man had ever 
been that could speak as this man, and no man has 
ever since left such a legacy to the world. In the 
midst of friends, how he flooded them with a supernal 
light; taught them the way that was strait but 
blessed; and constrained them to look up even unto 
the Father for every true comfort and light! Fac- 
ing his enemies, what fearless enunciation of the 
truth; what fealty to duty; what longing to brood 
over them with the wings of a forgiving spirit, which 
they knew not of and would not have ! In it all, even 
in the last agonizing cry for the Father's presence, 
what majesty of life — of divine life — but of hu- 
man life, as well! 

Now let us see more closely still how all this actu- 
ally came to be. By way of contrasting light, sup- 
pose his parents had been of a lower idealistic order 
themselves, and had congenitally endowed their son 
with certain physical characteristics doomed to early 
decay, or to certain emotional predispositions, un- 
stable and low ; suppose that during his infancy and 
childhood he had not been so carefully watched or so 
absolutely protected from accident and disease, or 
from the contaminating influence of vicious com- 
panions; suppose that, instead of faithful example 
in humble daily obedience, Jesus had been allowed to 
drift haphazardly in accordance, say, with reckless 
disobedience, or flippant trifling, or downright scoff- 



16 HIGHER LIVING 

ing in his home or neighborhood ; suppose that, when 
tempted, he had been so endowed that he had weakly 
yielded, instead of presenting the all-sufficient 
strength to fight it out to an everlasting conquest; 
suppose, likewise, that he had been handicapped with 
the sort of physical defect or moral timidity which 
at moments of stress forces so many to ignominious 
retreat and defeat. Suppose any or all of these 
legitimate possibilities ; would Jesus have subse- 
quently proven equal to the unique demands that 
were subsequently imposed upon him, the ultimate 
and convincing tests of his divinity? 

When we thus come really to examine the sources 
of his unique stability, strength and conquering 
spirit, — of his divine nature, in fact — how much 
do we find to have been simply the natural outcome 
of that genuine supremacy of well endowed, faithful 
— in a word — of entirely competent, earthly par- 
ents, who in this most natural, yet most divine way, 
were the sources of his real divinity, — sealed of God, 
but still awaiting clear affirmation in manliness. In 
their parenthood, Joseph and Mary had been so 
faithful to Israel's cumulative tendency and suprem- 
acy, that what had been before but an abstraction 
and a hope was now become a concrete realization in 
this, their son, anointed of the Highest. With the 
body he. had, with the mind he had, with the spiritual 
predisposition he had, it was certainly as natural as 
it was supernatural for him duly to be able to feel, 
see, think, and do what he did. In fact, without this 
perfectly human preparation, both in the race and 
in the family, it is not depreciating God's power 
or Jesus' divinity to say, that he would not and could 



THE MODEL MAN 17 

not have been what he was, or have exerted the influ- 
ence he did and still does. Nor does it depreciate 
his divinity to hold that, because his earthly parents 
had inherited such characteristic predispositions and 
were so faithful to all that their knowledge and ex- 
perience had shown them to be best, they were thus 
able very naturally to produce a fit measure of all 
that is best in human nature for the Spirit's filling 
and using, when the hour for divine work arrived. 
The divine progeniture of Jesus, then, was in the 
requisitely developed bodies, minds, and souls of 
Joseph and Mary ; his own divinity was owing to the 
Spirit's progressive and timely infusion and direc- 
tion of the ideal personality which was thus faith- 
fully presented for the " living sacrifice." To his 
humble, yet unswervingly faithful Nazarene parents 
there should be attributed the high honor of having 
presented the best mediumship then possible for the 
transmission of Israel's greatest ideal hope ; and for 
this they should be accredited as being worthy of all 
acceptation, as well as for being goodly patterns for 
parenthood universal. What they thus did for the 
personality of one, is encouragement for well-mean- 
ing and devoted endeavor in every home. Israel 
with her looking for a Messiah has now become the 
world; and the world now needs not one, but many, 
who shall thus be most truly begotten and anointed 
sons of God. The Model Son of Man should now 
become the model for all the Sons of Men. 



CHAPTER III 
CONSTRUCTIVE ANTICIPATION 



We may compare the building of the embryo to the 
unfolding of a record of memory, which is stored in the 
central nervous organism of the parent, and impressed 
in greater or less part on the germ plasma during its 
construction, in the order in which it is stored. This 
record may be supposed to be woven into the texture of 
every organic cell. e. d. cope 

A child, more than all other gifts 

That earth can offer to declining man, 

Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts. 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

Great peace have they which love thy law; and noth- 
ing shall offend them. psalm 

Children's children are the crown of old men; 
And the glory of children are their fathers. 

PROVERBS 

God bends from the deep and says, 

" I gave thee the great gift of life; 
Wast thou not called in many ways ? 

Are not my earth and heaven at strife? 
I gave thee of my seed to sow, 

Brought thou me a hundred fold ? " 
Can I look up with face aglow, 

And answer, " Father, here is gold " ? 

J. R. LOWELL 



CHAPTER III 

CONSTRUCTIVE ANTICIPATION 

Fundamental to all vital processes is the disposi- 
tion of every living structure, from the single cell to 
the most complete organism, to perpetuate itself in 
kind, throughout an unending series of succeeding 
generations. Next to that of securing requisite 
food, this is the most essential and dominant of the 
vital instincts. In the sweeping tides of human ex- 
perience, men and women are often constrained to 
dare all and to renounce everything, in order that 
this perpetuating characteristic of the great Selec- 
tive Energy may opportunely experience its fullest 
realization, in an unbroken line of its own chosen in- 
dividualities. So absolute is this demand, so im- 
perative this necessity, that often, in spite of every 
convention and every rational consideration, progeny 
is inconsiderately projected upon an environment in 
which every form of dire struggle must necessarily 
be met at no matter what cost of danger, distress, or 
failure. On the other hand, all such instinctive 
realization usually comes about in accordance with 
certain more favorable conditions; and the result 
proves to be one that may be largely approved of 
all. In any case, this instinct is indeed basal, in that 
it carries with it all the potentialities as well as some 
of the most vital actualities of life itself. 

21 



%& HIGHER LIVING 

Coincident with the predominance and activity of 
this instinct, is the concomitant realization of the 
most nearly absolute joy of living. Every impulse 
parentward is normally fraught with anticipatory 
happiness so keen and unique, that, in many in- 
stances, attention is liable to be monopolized by it to 
an extent and with a persistence which are seldom 
if ever equaled in respect of any other experience. 
Moreover, everything in heaven and earth — all the 
idealizing of poetry and fiction; much of the specu- 
lation of philosophy as well as the hopes and fears of 
religion; the frequently repeated suggestions of the 
household and neighborhood; many and repeated 
scientific hints — all conspire to awaken interest in, 
and to keep attention fixed upon, these vital antici- 
pations and experiences and their ultimate fruition. 
Surely, there must be an unusual meaning in all this, 
one that is as high and pure and as constructive as 
should be the determination with which it seeks to be 
realized. 

If this be so, how important that during all the 
stages of pre-parental formation right notions and 
aspirations and practices shall undeviatingly prevail ; 
likewise that the determining influence of all the ten- 
sions, irritabilities, depressions, elations, confidences, 
antipathies and attractions, so incident to this 
period, shall be as accurately and as thoroughly esti- 
mated and managed as possible ; in fact, that every- 
thing appertaining to this period shall be so undevi- 
atingly subjected to constructive influences only that 
emotional wholesomeness, glad seriousness and divine 
responsibility, shall each in turn so far as possible 
be invoked to dominate over every possibility of 



CONSTRUCTIVE ANTICIPATION 23 

selfish gratification, mawkish lewdness, or reckless 
chance-taking, whatsoever. Indeed, every study of 
the reproductive instinct and its associated experi- 
ences shows that prospective parents owe it to them- 
selves as well as to their children, that this vital-most 
realization shall be ever kept as holy as is the bio- 
logical perpetuity of which it is so suggestive and 
prophetic. 

To this most holy end, then, let the knowledge that 
certain pre-parental habits of feeling, thought and 
conduct actually do help or hinder prospective pro- 
geny, be most religiously accepted and allowed to 
prevail. Thus, if the expected child is really de- 
sired, if its little life is held as a bit of heaven de- 
scended upon earth, if its natural and conventional 
necessities are all regarded as welcome awakeners of 
a consciousness of choice privilege and enviable 
realization and high responsibility ; then, surely, let 
it confidently be believed, that the reaction of all this, 
upon the growing product will exclusively conduce 
toward an ever-increasing influence for good. If, 
likewise, all the personal reactions to the multitudin- 
ous suggestions of daily life are direct and buoyant 
and optimistic, if, in fact, the whole pre-parental life 
is steeped in hope and contentment and trust, then, 
assuredly, may there again be expected a correspond- 
ing realization, in more or less obvious measure. So, 
too, if there prevails constant efforts to be brave 
and appreciative of the high calling to which pros- 
pective parents are called, and especially if from 
hour to hour there are consciously effected succes- 
sive increments of self-realization along lines which 
definitely require the employment of one's best ener- 



S4 HIGHER LIVING 

gies, then surely nothing whatever can entirely hin- 
der all this from becoming a prominent part of the 
final endowment with which progeny may be enriched, 
even if not to the full extent prayed for or most reas- 
onably expected. Finally, if there is an earnest en- 
deavor on the part of expectant parents to find and 
realize in their own souls all the deeper meanings of 
nature, those that are derivable not only from the 
mighty and impressive harmonies of Absolute Being, 
but from the spiritual sweetnesses of human devotion 
and prayer that emanate from a holy life within, it 
may again confidently be trusted that the prospective 
life will thus be made by this much at least more har- 
monious, and will likewise be constrained to live on a 
correspondingly higher plane of individual and ra- 
cial progress and attainment, than otherwise. 

Certainly, also, let another most modern eugenic 
instruction and assurance prevail, namely, that un- 
derlying all the pre-parental life, there are a number 
of significant discoveries that should be seriously 
heeded, — such, for instance, as that everything un- 
used atrophies, everything wrongly used distorts, 
and everything rightly used becomes an evidence of 
things, which, if not now seen, may yet be unfail- 
ingly and proportionately expected and realized, in 
due season. Of course this does not affirm or imply 
that even the most intelligent and devoted endeavor 
of any one generation may be able fully to obviate or 
mitigate the untoward bungling and sinning of all the 
preceding ones ; but it does affirm without reserva- 
tion, that all such holy endeavor is the first really 
influential and practical step toward securing the 
ultimate happy result desired for self, and also 



CONSTRUCTIVE ANTICIPATION 25 

setting the pace by which certain much needed recti- 
fying predispositions may be ultimately established 
in the family line, as the generations succeed one an- 
other. 

If Israel's happy, devoted expectancy did not pre- 
dispose to its long expected national King, but did 
realize itself nevertheless in the comely form, the 
comprehensive mind, and the spiritualized energy of 
the Son of Man, then surely is there both divine and 
human incentive thus to anticipate the betterment of 
the human race as a whole, and for each individual to 
promote this as rapidly as practicable. 

Responsible parenthood, then, begins at least some 
two score weeks before the child's birth. From the 
very beginning on through all the ante-natal period, 
it is by far more than a mere supposition that, what- 
ever the anticipatory mother's condition may be or 
may become, parental responsibility cannot be 
rightly disregarded, either by herself or by those 
around her. Entirely dependent, as the embryo is, 
upon the mother's blood for requisite nutrition and 
warmth and protection, it follows that its ultimate 
growth and promise must be quite exactly in accord- 
ance with the richness, purity and regularity of the 
supply of this and all the influences transmitted by it. 
In fact, during all the ante-natal period, life for the 
mother thus becomes a more or less deterministic life 
for the growing organism that is so intimately 
associated with her own body and its inherent vital- 
ity. 

This is more clearly appreciated when we note the 
rapidity and extent of the developmental processes 
during this period. Starting as a single cell, within 



26 HIGHER LIVING 

three months this multiplies so as to reach the mar- 
vellous number of at least 26,500,000,000, that is to 
say, about the entire number which at any time 
comprises the human body. By computation this 
multitude of cells is seen to have gone on increasing 
at something like an average rate of thirty-four 
thousand for each and every second; while the 
entire increase in bodily weight during the ante-natal 
period is reckoned to be at not less than thirty thou- 
sand fold! 

During the succeeding six months, the entire en- 
ergy and activity of growth goes chiefly if not to the 
production of new cells, then to the elaboration of 
the cellular elements already formed, until, at birth, 
this increase has become over five million fold. 
While this incredible growth has been going on, other 
equally important changes have occurred in the di- 
rection of realizing the special structural plan of the 
human being. Thus, the cells from being simple and 
unrelated, as at first, have become grouped and dif- 
ferentiated into the several different tissues, such as 
bone, muscles, glands, etc., and these, in turn, into 
systems, such as the digestive, circulatory, excretory, 
and nervous. Moreover, all these latter have become 
correlated and bound into a unified organism, whose 
many lines of future activity have thus been specially 
provided for. In all this, we must note a wise pro- 
vision for plasticity and education from the first, 
one, moreover, which obviously may be either wisely 
or unwisely taken advantage of. If all this makes 
the human babe seem wonderful indeed, yet must we 
also regard it as no less wonderful in its helplessness, 
its fragility, and certainly in its almost unlimited pos- 



CONSTRUCTIVE ANTICIPATION 27 

sibilities for good or ill, according to the moulding to 
which it is subjected. 

Hence, how unusual is the significance which at- 
taches to the fact, that it is during this most plas- 
tic period that the initiative of Higher Living both 
for the individual and the race may be and should be 
taken. In many obvious senses, and in many senses 
likewise not yet so easily demonstrable, it is probable 
that whatever is here initiated, and especially what- 
soever here becomes fixed, not only tends to persist, 
but in a wa}' that largely determines the essential 
characteristics of the organism and its functioning, 
later on. Physically, this is more readily proven. 
Mentally and morally, if not so readily proven, still 
it is quite enough so to warrant the general conclu- 
sion that, whatever the life of the parents and espe- 
cially of the mother may be during this important 
period of human development, it will certainly exer- 
cise a most important bearing upon the child's en- 
tire subsequent history. Hence, it may be accepted 
as an entirely safe conviction that, if the mother pos- 
sesses and continues throughout the period of gesta- 
tion to remain in good physical health, and likewise 
to be properly protected from impairing physical 
shocks, burdens, or infections ; if she has a good mind, 
and is carefully saved from prolonged depressions, 
griefs, and worries, and every sort of unwholesome 
mental contagion ; if she possesses a happy, confi- 
dent spirit, and is not dominated by soul-rending 
superstitions and ignorances ; and, especially, if she 
has the intelligent good sense every day to do the 
very best she can to correct recognized deficiencies, 
she can confidently expect that the vitalmost inter- 



28 HIGHER LIVING 

ests of her unborn child will thus be conserved and 
advanced, even to the utmost extent of her natural 
ability, and that for compensation she will ultimately 
realize nothing less than every joy of motherhood 
that is her due. 

On the other hand, the expectant mother should 
always and with the same definiteness remember that, 
by letting the body become overfed, or under-exer- 
cised ; by sitting down in idle dreaming, and especially 
in silly hatred, or apprehension or despondency; by 
keeping up over-heated emotion of any kind, or yield- 
ing to extreme passionate revels or indulgences ; by 
permitting the development of uncalled-for exhaus- 
tion; by contracting serious diseases, or indulging 
in drug stimulations, or by experiencing prolonged 
and discouraging deprivations, either physical, men- 
tal or moral; that by any or all of these she may 
just as surely bring about such a deterioration of 
her own blood as will seriously affect the structural 
elements of the plastic, impressionable, and so very 
dependent foetus, and consequently bring upon her 
helpless progeny subsequent defects of structure and 
functioning that may forever interfere with its full 
realization of the life to which it is entitled. This 
makes it simply impossible to overestimate the re- 
sponsibility of parents to endeavor to do their very 
best to endow their prospective progeny with every 
such enduring and constructive characteristic as may 
be possible. 

In endeavoring to effect such a constructive en- 
dowment, experience has shown also that the expect- 
ant mother, instead of considering herself in any way 
an invalid and unable to undertake her ordinary du- 



CONSTRUCTIVE ANTICIPATION 29 

ties, may much the better continue all through the 
period of gestation to engage in some laudable phys- 
ical work, such as the ordinary light household du- 
ties, to live in as cheerful surroundings as possible, 
to read books that inspire and inform, to converse 
with those who uplift, to think chiefly about high 
and holy things ; to keep before her mind's eye a 
vivid image of the healthy, happy child she would 
like to have; to reach out to all good influences, and 
especially to her God for a guiding, strengthening 
hand; to live joyfully, energetically, trustingly, and 
unceasingly to invite and love and rejoice fully in all 
the happier ideas and experiences of motherhood. If 
she does this faithfully, she may be as sure as of 
anything in her life, that she hath done what she 
could for her unborn child, and that probably 
heaven itself will not fail to smile upon her gra- 
ciously and make her most assuredly to feel herself 

" Becoming, when the time has birth, 

A lever to uplift the earth, 
And roll it in another course," 

and so to be as completely satisfied eventually, as she 
has so fully made herself to deserve. 

On no account, then, should anything or anybody 
be allowed or forced to interfere with this, the 
mother's divine privilege and duty of giving her un- 
born child, who itself has an unquestioned right to 
it, the most complete and symmetrical endowment 
possible. Nor society, nor church, nor friends, nor 
other children, nor any kind of self-interest or self- 
indulgence, should be allowed here to have sway. In 
fact, both the biological and ethical imperative is 



SO HIGHER LIVING 

here determined absolutely by the high significance 
and noble urgency of this aspect of Higher Living. 
Any sort of chance-taking is evidence of a moral and 
intellectual life on the lower vital level which obtained 
before the ability to make a conscious voluntary 
higher choice was reached. In this connection, 
Higher Living means alone devoted obedience to 
modern intelligence, for which, any sort of even 
plausible guessing or fancy cannot, in any right 
sense, be made or accepted as a safe or rightful sub- 
stitute. 



CHAPTER IV 
MOTHER AND BABE 



Consider what it means in the divine dynamics that 
every moment a child is born into the world — the in- 
carnate symbol of a new life. henry mills alden 

A baby is a ray of sunshine, sent to earth to brighten 
the pathway of people who have souls. 

GEORGE W. PECK 

The babe by its mother 

Lies bathed in joy; 
Glide the hours uncounted — 

The sun is its toy; 
Shines the peace of all being, 

Without cloud in its eyes ; 
And the sum of the world, 

In soft miniature lies. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Dear buds of flesh and blood, 

So dear, so dear to me, 
I dread the thoughts that dwell 

Upon the years to be. 

JOHN VANCE CHENEY 



CHAPTER IV 
MOTHER AND BABE 

Over the mist-lands of parturient trial and tremu- 
lous apprehension, let there most helpfully brood the 
spirit of fellowship and ministry, grace and hope. 
Nowhere else in all this world is there a spot so sa- 
cred; only similar ones where so much is pending. 
For months, another woman's life has meant vastly 
more than mere selfish living. Once again has the 
Creative Spirit taken possession of budding mother- 
liness, and for much of the time, as even between 
heaven and earth, has there been maintained all that 
is most vitally significant. As never before, has 
Mary again appreciated the worth of woman's life 
in the movements of God upon the earth ; and so, too, 
has Elizabeth again come and gone, never so fully 
rejoicing in the consciousness of the royal bond that 
holds all women in a sisterhood, which neither circum- 
stance nor time nor eternity can seriously weaken ! 

And now, at last, the great hour is at hand but with 
confusion that necessarily perplexes, with pain that 
exhausts, with shocked sensibility that slowly be- 
comes numb, with life that wanes and waxes ; and all, 
as none other than women may rightly understand 
or measure. Betimes, courage and faintness and 
prayer flit, successively across the shadowy horizons ; 
and then, with what beautiful determination is the 
struggle renewed, with what courage the final throe 

33 



34 HIGHER LIVING 

anticipated and endured! All creation hath tra- 
vailed for this moment ; aye, is not the mother a part 
of the Creative Energy? Stand close now, all who 
are strong and inspiring. With hushed breath and 
weakening heart, see how tremulously balanced is this 
vital fortune; yet, how triumphant! For unto the 
world a babe is once more born; again the shadows 
are letting the light appear, a light so holy, that any- 
one may see, if he will, how nothing less than divine 
is the event realized. And now, as the mother lies 
back so peacefully in the arms of Almighty Love, 
how, from her self-offering doth she radiate both the 
love and the light, and from eyes that are indeed full 
of the sweet benediction of their satisfied beauty ; and 
all because once more a woman hath done what she 
could, and the seal of divinity has again been set upon 
motherhood, never to be effaced! 

Reverently looking back upon it, with what satis- 
faction does this picture of dynamic realization pre- 
sent itself to every normal sensibility. The peace- 
fulness of it, the sweetness, the glory — who shall 
over-praise, or offer a too responsive heart! Like- 
wise the ideality of it — of all this truly divine- 
human experience — of the time and place where life 
is successfully emergent. Let it never fade from 
memory, be lost or superseded. Let it ever be as a 
living Bible, where may be read such psalms and 
beatitudes as shall eventually lift the race, even unto 
heaven itself ! 

And now, as the wonderful hours pass on, and the 
newly become mother looks wistfully down upon the 
tender product of her vitality for the unnumbered 
time, who shall chide or even wonder, if, perhaps un- 



MOTHER AND BABE 35 

expectedly, certain rather deep questionings concern- 
ing the outcome of this particular experience shall 
obtrusively force themselves upon her, now so di- 
vinely sensitized, consciousness ; or, if, ere long, these 
questionings shall give tone to all her thoughts, even 
unto a sadness unspeakable, as she tremblingly asks 
herself, Will the afterglow of this hour be exclusively 
a radiance of light unto light, or instead will there 
always be certain threatening shadows hovering too 
near for perfect assurance, and perhaps never to be 
understood or dispelled? In fact must she not many 
times, in vague but yet impressive presentiment, al- 
ready see her child growing through the coming 
years, not only into the conservatism and fixity of 
the constitution given by herself and her mate, on the 
one hand, but, on the other hand, into all the mold- 
ing as well that must necessarily come from the 
great and deviating or obstructive world in which 
humanity lives? "At birth," says Emerson, "the 
gate of gifts is closed " ; but the mother knows or 
intuits all too well, that at the selfsame moment other 
even broader gates are opened — those through 
which enemies as well as friends may come and will 
come to help or to hinder the development of her 
child, and perhaps to change its destiny forever. 
Hence, as she looks out through these broader ever- 
more numerous gates and sees, not only people who 
have grown more and more into man-likeness and 
God-likeness as they have come under the spell of the 
world's powerful influences, but also many other 
people who, under very similar conditions, have pro- 
gressively developed traits that have only proved 
their close affiliation with the lower orders of crea- 



36 HIGHER LIVING 

tion, and their most ready reversion to certain lower 
ancestral types, our mother must realize, perhaps 
all too seriously, that possibly her own life may some 
day have to go out in one awful wail of extreme fore- 
boding or actual sorrow, in the anguished cry, 

Who has drugged my boy's cup ? 

Who has mixed my boy's bread ? 
Who, with sadness and madness, 

Has turned my child's head? 

and, as she listens, oh, so anxiously! for any sort of 
retrieving, assuring voice in answer, to be only over- 
whelmed with direst pain, instead of assuring com- 
fort! 

Lest then, our mother's apprehension turn itself 
too surely into a seriously detrimental or even vicious 
influence that may pre-determine the future life of 
her child, and so help unexpectedly to realize her own 
dread, let us, who may in this self-same moment be 
privileged to fulfil so truly a God-given opportunity, 
gently but firmly whisper to her apprehensive heart 
something like this : " Oh, yes, but then, 

" Love works at the center, 

Heart-heaving alway; 
Forth speed the strong pulses 

To the borders of day, 
Deep love lieth under 

These pictures of time," 

and endeavor thus, and in every other goodly way 
possible, to inspire her to believe even more surely 
than ever, that, through the " strong pulses " of her 
own self-appreciated and self-realized nature, she 
may yet continue to be a part of, indeed by far the 



MOTHER AND BABE 37 

greater part of, the dominant neutralizing and con- 
structive influences upon the self-same world stage ; 
and^ that many of the most ominous of her time-pic- 
tures concerning the future of her child may yet be 
made to fade away before her own predominant dif- 
fusion of the better purpose and the brighter light. 



CHAPTER V 
THE FATHER AND HIS BABE 



Touch us gently, Time! 

Let us glide adown thy stream 
Gently, as we sometimes glide 

Thro' a quiet dream. 
Humble voyagers are we, 
Husband, wife, and children three, 
(One is lost, an angel, fled 
To the azure overhead.) 

Touch us gently, Time! 

We've not proud nor soaring wings, 
Our ambition, our content, 

Lie in simple things. 
Humble voyagers are we, 
O'er Life's dim, unsounded sea, 
Seeking only some calm clime; 
Touch us gently, gentle Time! 

BRYAN WALLER PROCTOR 

Children make a greater metamorphosis in men than 
any other condition of life. They ripen one wonder- 
fully and make life ten times better worth having than it 

Was. HUXLEY TO HAECKEL 

Yet in my lineaments they trace 
Some features of my father's face. 

LORD BYRON 

A mother's pride, a father's joy. 

WALTER SCOTT 

This expression of ours, " Father of a family." 

PLINY THE YOUNGER 

Who is there whom bright and agreeable children do 
not attract to play and weep and prattle with them ? 

EPICTETUS 



CHAPTER V 
THE FATHER AND HIS BABE 

The mother's reception of her baby is apt to be 
with no more serious qualification than perhaps that 
which is implied by the question, " Is it all right ? " 
It comes to her as a pledge of herself, her love, her 
pain, her hope, and she knows that upon her loving 
care will henceforth depend very much the pros- 
perity of the little one itself, from whom, in return, 
she expects to receive satisfactory largess of baby 
dimples as well as childish demands. 

But the father — how has he to readjust himself, 
in order to get the requisite new perspective; and 
how must he immediately begin to measure the end 
to be gained with the end purposed ! Moreover, how 
surely must his attitude toward the new possession 
undergo a series of changes ; — perhaps like that of 
the man whose wife invested some of her money in 
the West. At first this husband always spoke doubt- 
ingly if not sneeringly of " Kate's farm out in Ne- 
braska." After a year or two of good returns, he 
condescended to say at times, " Our farm out in Ne- 
braska." Not long after, the good woman acci- 
dentally overheard him bragging to a neighbor about 
" My farm," etc. So with the babe. At first it is 
apt to be just " hers," then, " ours," and finally, 
" mine " ; and woe unto whomsoever would in the 
slightest attempt to dispute his title to the entire new 

possession ! 

41 



42 HIGHER LIVING 

But all this simply denotes the healthy growth of 
the masculine consciousness, which naturally is earlier 
inhibited by the due caution and expectancy that it 
has for its foundation. Away back in Sanscrit 
times, Father meant " protector " ; and true to this 
meaning still, instinct constrains every father to such 
attitudes and methods as will realize this meaning 
most surely. Down deep in his true nature man 
realizes that woman in her weakness and her devotion 
to infancy has need of provision and protection, and 
that these require his timely forethought and the best 
use of his strength; require, in fact, just the special 
kind of manly " calculation " that estimates every- 
thing, even the babe, at its real worth, and acts ac- 
cordingly. 

Understanding this, it is interesting to note how 
the ordinary man goes about doing it ; — but we 
must not smile ! For how can he, with his blurry 
vision, his as yet unattuned ears and his clumsy 
fingers, even half perceive the meaning of all the 
strange newcomer's pathetic " wails and wabbles " ? 
Try as he will, he is most probably so overawed by 
the mystery, the apprehensive forecast, the jugglery 
of it all, that he much prefers postponement of his 
mature judgment indefinitely, to attempting much 
handling, to say even less duly appreciating, what to 
him seems at best but a mere bundle of possibilities, 
and these all too remote to be very inspiring, recep- 
tive and impressionable as he may try to be. 

Yet, in spite of all such inner aloofness and outer 
inadequacy, the father is really kept almost continu- 
ously in such necessary relations with the babe that 
his influence must be reckoned with and from the verv 



THE FATHER AND HIS BABE 43 

first. Even his absences affect the scale, while his 
presences weigh unmistakably, through both him- 
self and the mother whom he impresses. Hence, if 
he is really as he should be, strong, firm, gentle, wise, 
provident and faithful, both mother and child are 
thus furnished, so far as he is concerned, with an 
atmosphere in which they both can thrive, as would 
not be at all possible were he otherwise. If, too, he 
have the intelligence that he should have been pro- 
vided with long before this day of supreme need, if he 
have responsible clear constructive ideas of marriage 
and home and progeny, it will follow as day the sun 
that his loved ones will correspondingly profit 
thereby, and that his own cup of satisfaction will not 
lack of desired fullness ; while as for the mother, who 
after her great trial of pain has such unprecedented 
need to lean most heavily upon the manly form of 
her husband, the strong sense of his disciplined mind, 
and the brave outlook of his spirit, it is always quite 
as sure that she will realize both the fullness and the 
worth of his support to her heart's content; in that 
her life will sooner become recuperated, her nurtural 
care of her child more wholesome, and her very soul 
will grow hourly in all the sweet, wide graciousness 
that crowns the complete mother everywhere. And 
to the child, too, who needs just as truly as the 
mother the radiance of the father's stronger self, the 
radiancy of all that fatherhood should mean, there 
will likewise result much indeed that it otherwise 
would be sadly deprived of. 

Generally speaking, it may be affirmed that until a 
man is brought face to face with this unique realiza- 
tion of fatherhood he remains, at best, but a sort of 



U HIGHER LIVING 

immaturity, an immaturity however that he may 
upon occasion successfully try to ripen, if only he 
will. In order to do this, however, he needs always 
to try to be at his best, to exercise most fully his 
highest functions, to " live in both worlds " to every 
extent possible, in fact unremittingly to grow as fully 
as possible to the stature of his calling as parent. 
Then, reflected back from the baby face and hands 
and all the little affairs of the baby world upon him, 
who as progenitor has fullest right to it all, there is 
such a benediction of life and love as even foreshows 
the very best of heaven itself ; and, if he despises not 
this day of small things, he will very soon find that 
certain awkward angularities of person will duly dis- 
appear, certain obtrusive selfish conceits be dispelled, 
and certain other moral hindrances be overcome ; and, 
furthermore, that this will come to pass just to the 
extent and assiduity with which he welcomes and ap- 
propriates this significant influence from the cradle. 
Hence, it becomes the newly made father at first and 
all along to take careful estimate of himself as never 
before, and to seek desirable light with all earnest- 
ness, in order that he may be able so to round out 
his own character as in every way to be able to re- 
spond to this elevating and broadening power. If 
the mother in her own peculiar sphere should read 
and think and feel everything that is of the very 
best, in no -sense should the father fail any the less 
to fill his mind with every favorable cultural influ- 
ence, and to associate himself with everything and 
everybody that is on the highest cultural plane pos- 
sible. 

Now is the time, also, when both husband and wife, 



THE FATHER AND HIS BABE 45 

inspired by the common interest of their child, should 
find one another out as never otherwise. He, with 
all his finer characteristics as man and father, may 
now become for the first time fully revealed to her as 
a deep, true, abiding delight and strength, never to 
be doubted or deserted. She, with all her feminine 
qualities lighted up by motherhood, may now be- 
come to him the radiance of a light that never was 
before, the promise of a companionship that shall be 
eternal. Here it is that man and woman may, if 
ever, truly find each other, not as lovers, which is 
well, but as eternal friends, which is best. Here it 
is that differences in constitution, training and aspi- 
rations may all be dissolved in the alembic of that 
chivalry which gives fully and takes freely and knows 
no thine and mine forevermore. Here it is that the 
finite, the limited, the egotistic, may become trans- 
formed into the universal thought and feeling, — the 
very soul of the higher life. Here Higher Living 
may become, not an inspiration for or anticipation of 
all that is best for one, but for two — or three — 
ah, for all ! And then, when the heart beats truly 
for, and the hand goes out in glad clasping of, every 
other babe, every other child, everybody, then do 
both parents become indeed members of one house- 
hold of the All-Father, a household in which the 
highest known privilege of the man is fulfilled, the 
highest aspiration of the mother realized, the highest 
living for everyone conceivable, enjoyed. Indeed the 
Christ Himself is now the joint heir in the midst — 
the hope of glory — the indisputable fact of the 
highest hope. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE NEWLY BORN 



The elementary laws never apologize. 

WALT WHITMAN 

The baby new to earth and sky 

What time his tender palm is pressed 
Against the circle of the breast, 

Has never thought that " This is I." 

But as he grows he gathers much, 

And learns the use of " I " and " me," 
And finds " I am not what I see, 

And other than the thing/? I touch." 

So rounds he to a separate mind 

From whence clear memory may begin, 
As thro' the frame that binds him in 

His isolation grows defined. 

ALFRED TENNYSON 

Woman's life and child's love, child's life and woman's 
sensibility; and in general the childward care and the 
womanly soul are only divided by an intellectual dis- 
crimination. In essence they are all one, for God has 
placed the bodily and mental progress and perpetuation 
of the human race through childhood, under the control 
of woman's heart and soul, and of right womanly sensi- 
bility. FRIEDRICH FROEBEL 

O small beginnings, ye are great and strong, 
Based on a faithful heart and weariless brain ! 

Ye build the future fair, ye conquer wrong, 
Ye earn the crown, and wear it not in vain. 

J. R. LOWELL 



CHAPTER VI 
THE NEWLY BORN 

From the period of softest infantile plasticity on, 
the growth of every tissue and feature and func- 
tion proceeds according to the gently constructing 
power of " the one Eternal Idea in which we are," 
and which must be conceived as providing all the vital 
conditions that have previously prevailed and that 
will prevail henceforward and now make associated 
functioning possible. 

Scientifically investigated, it has been found that 
the newly born babe is in the truer sense absolutely 
mindless, and this simply because of the fact that its 
brain and the sense organs, which later are to be able 
to supply the brain with informing and stimulating 
impressions, are, as yet, not sufficiently developed for 
true mental activity. At this time, the muscle-and- 
nerve organs have become the most nearly prepared, 
and those of smell and taste are also now fairly rip- 
ened for their important work ; but the ears must yet 
await some startling shock before they are opened, 
and the eyes, as yet but about two-thirds grown, must 
wait for several weeks before either the form or the 
color of anything can be definitely distinguished. 
Centrally in the brain, it is found that the necessary 
completion of the brain cells has not yet been fully 
enough effected, and that likewise many of the fibers 

49 



50 HIGHER LIVING 

needed for connecting these cells with one another 
have not yet been enough perfected, for systematic 
work. In fact, the newly born babe is but a bundle 
of possibilities and latencies, while practically its only 
hope lies in the long period of infancy that is before 
it, and in all the elements of environment that the 
human parent is capable of furnishing it. 

Following birth, any time after a day or two, 
there may be seen what are called " reflex smiles " ; 
but not until the fifth or seventh week can anything 
like real smiles with a smiling significance, be confi- 
dently noted. Real tears also may be noted by the 
third week, and surprise any time after the first week ; 
while during the earlier part of the second month 
poutings and pursings of the lips, to be followed later 
by Teachings out for attractive things, are begun. 
During the third month something like voluntary 
movements of the arm, hand and leg serially in order 
are manifest, while wonder, anger, jealousy and fear 
begin more or less definitely to show themselves. A 
month later, suggestion has become all important, 
especially as coming from those who are most closely 
in constant charge ; because of the fact that, as Pro- 
fessor Mary Calkins has ascertained, frequency is 
the most constant condition of suggestibility. At 
this time attenion, which, according to Baldwin is 
" originally considered an habitual motor reaction 
upon mental contrasts," especially of things moving, 
with also certain manifestations of desire or refrain, 
such as fondness for certain people and antipathy 
for certain others," have become established, while 
all such preferences, as well as certain other warm 
interests, are apt to be made known by truly expres- 



THE NEWLY BORN 51 

sive noises and movements. About this time, con- 
scious memory also becomes manifest, and certain 
foundations of the especial type of character, 
whether motor, or visual, or auditory, or tactual, are 
being laid. Soon, conscious imitation of movements 
and sounds rapidly increases, and denotes the rise of 
volition; while various and persistent dramatizing 
efforts, from this point on, help to bring out the 
differentiation of the baby's own self from the other 
selves with whom contact is had. Thus, by the eighth 
month the babe has developed certain evidences of 
being able to distinguish form and color and position 
more or less clearly, and of signifying its choices as 
to things and people ; moreover, of more or less con- 
sciously incorporating the meaning of these into its 
owm personality. Not long after this, there appears 
increasing power of attention, always very feeble dur- 
ing the earlier months and often remaining thus for 
a long time, and, with many people, even through- 
out life. Creeping also, and attempts at walking; 
spontaneous, expressive smiles ; inhibition of natural 
functions and impulses ; more or less deliberation and 
its concomitant reason ; all serve to mark the rise of 
the personality, which, if it is given play for its 
proper development, will some time subordinate 
everything to its own, and, let us hope, its better pur- 
poses. Always, along with these, there are more or 
less developed a sense of beauty, increasing interest 
in rhythm and music, and, since about the fourth 
month, there will have been exhibited an increasing 
preference of one hand over the other in attempts to 
reach out and grasp things ; while, simultaneously, 
speech and words, the one function that makes man- 



52 HIGHER LIVING 

kind really what it is, slowly emerge out of a medley 
of throat noises into definite form, in time to become 
replete with purposive significance. 

All this it is which makes it so important that, in- 
stead of reading into the baby-mind and its mani- 
festations in conduct, so many of our own adult con- 
ceptions of understanding and right, as no less a 
philosopher than Immanuel Kant did, who declared a 
newly born babe had " a mind of its own and should 
be whipped if it did not behave itself," we should seek 
to know and observe the natural stages of actual 
growth and their mental and moral possibilities, and 
then, to adjust our ideas and practices of discipline 
and education to these, and to these very chiefly. 
No one knows the extent to which the race has been 
kept back physically, mentally and morally, simply 
by attempts to train the child in the way a man 
should go, instead of in the only way appropriate to 
itself. All dicta from whatever source that do not 
include this fundamental knowledge of infant nature 
and nurture, should be rejected as more or less po- 
tentially detrimental and otherwise unreliable. This 
world is everywhere, even in the human personality, 
developed according to intelligent and intelligible 
principles ; and never exclusively according to fan- 
cies derived simply from dreams, either sleeping or 
waking. A study of infant nature reveals that it is 
not only the' highest business of parents most care- 
fully to ascertain what these intelligible principles 
are, and the methods by which they have been cre- 
atively at work, but also to enter into the grand 
creative conspiracy to make human nature all that 
the application of such accurately ascertained prin- 



THE NEWLY BORN 53 

ciples and methods promises. " God helps man 
through man " ; when we help mankind fundamen- 
tally, then are we God-like indeed ! Consequently it 
should be remembered, that during the earliest days 
of our infant's life changes of temperature should 
not be too pronounced ; that harsh noises and bright 
lights should be shut out, or but gradually admitted ; 
that the mother's milk should not be allowed to be- 
come vitiated by injudicious emotional or physical 
shocks or strains; or, if maternal substitutes are 
needed, that these should be intelligently and faith- 
fully chosen, prepared and administered; that pure 
air, proper bathing, sufficient sleep, should be con- 
sidered as invaluable portions of the higher nursery 
code; and that quietude, hope, joyfulness and 
requisite tenderness should be included in the nursery 
beatitudes, and never forgotten, even momentarily; 
that with all, and fundamental to all, the movements 
of the baby's limbs, so wayward, and yet so neces- 
sarily so, should be allowed to remain untrammeled 
from first to last. For, out of these simple things 
must there arise all its future health, its growth, and 
the reliable basis of all its subsequent knowledge and 
usefulness. 

Step by step then from crudest sensibility, from 
most wayward motion, from utter helplessness and 
thoughtlessness, the babe gradually grows into pow- 
ers of recognition, self-direction, locomotion and in- 
telligence, and, in a half dozen years or so reaches 
the most important possibility on earth, namely, the 
period of childhood proper. But never again can 
the sweet monopoly of the earlier days be either his or 
ours. Nor will he ever again in so short a time 



54 HIGHER LIVING 

grow so fast or learn so much. Indeed so much has 
this been that undoubtedly it will largely influence his 
whole life. Happy the parents who can feel that, 
all through their little one's earlier development, 
through every fortune good or ill, they have done 
their best so to provide and care for, to instruct and 
impress, that never will the childish dimples under 
any strain give way to untimely wrinkles, never the 
heart grow unsound or the body prematurely old or 
weak, because of their high duty unknown or neg- 
lected. " I have done my best," is the legitimate 
correlative of " she hath done what she could." 

As may be surmised from what has already been 
said, we may further conclude that infancy, with 
scarcely a legitimate exception finds its proper 
nurture and environment only at the mother-heart, 
in its proper home on the mother-lap. In the in- 
vestigations of science, as well as the experiments of 
common life, nothing has been found to be really a 
substitute for this. Its undeveloped nature, its irre- 
sponsibility, its very helplessness, and, with all, its 
long continuance, make the human infant an object of 
exquisite importance and care during every moment 
of its little life. That in so many instances it must 
be denied the mother nurture, the home protection, to 
say nothing of parental love and intelligence, is one 
of the crudest perversions and failures of human life. 
Every child has the divine right to be not only well 
born, but thoroughly well-nurtured after it is born; 
and to this supreme interest there is nothing in 
heaven or earth that should be allowed to take prece- 
dence unless absolutely necessary. 

But how shall the mother assure herself that she 



THE NEWLY BORN 55 

is capable of fully advancing the well-being of her 
child, as the successive days and weeks bring forth 
one after another their definite manifestations of its 
life tendencies? Only, we are sure, by close study 
and careful record of each phase of its growth in 
the light of what she should have already learned, or 
else should at once proceed to learn, about the rela- 
tionships of the nurtural environment to her child's 
needs. Thus, if she herself has not a strong and 
rightly functioning body, let her at once endeavor to 
make it so, by the kind of food, exercise, recreation, 
rest and personal comfort that she ought to be able 
to command, and that she should seldom, if ever, let 
secondary matters deprive her of. Or, if she has an 
explosive, or depressed, or shallow mind, let her sedu- 
lously attempt to correct this in all appropriate 
ways, by disciplinary self-control, by sensible ener- 
gizing in worth-while directions, and by studious 
perusal of all such books and steadfast devotion to 
all such exercises as are acknowledged to be most 
truly educational in this respect. Fully one-half the 
failures of mothers are due simply to presumption or 
indolence or misplaced activity. Should the trouble 
be more intimately personal or spiritual, let her per- 
sistently keep before her mind the one great prize of 
her high calling, namely, fully to give the rapidly 
growing child all that her body and mind and spirit 
can possibly afford. This will most truly help her 
to forget her selfish introspection and foolish quib- 
bling and serve to prevent their baneful effects upon 
herself and others. Brooding over one's shortcom- 
ings, even in the presence of some clearly defined 
duty, is a misapplication of time and thought that 



56 HIGHER LIVING 

cannot very frequently, if ever, be justified, espe- 
cially in the case of the mother who would really do 
her full duty by her child. 

In order that parental enterprise may most surely 
take on a more adaptable character than is often the 
case, the following or a similar list of instructive 
books of which there are many may be used : " The 
Care of the Baby," by Dr. Crozer Griffith; " Letters 
to a Mother," by Susan E. Blow ; " The Story of the 
Mind," by Mark Baldwin ; " The Child. A Study in 
the Evolution of Man," by A. F. Chamberlain; and, 
if practicable, the various articles on Human Nature 
to be found in the Pedagogical Seminary and the 
American Journal of Psychology, etc. 

Such books and articles as these, carefully and con- 
tinuously perused, will ultimately train the inexperi- 
enced' parent in such a way that most of the gross 
blunders now so prevalent will be very largely pre- 
vented. Nor should the mother, as a rule, attempt 
to read these exclusively by herself alone. What she 
learns should be freely given to others ; what other 
mothers learn, she has a full right to know. Hence 
the neighborhood conference or club for such pur- 
poses should become a common thing and be made use 
of as thoroughly as practicable. This is very nearly 
what the kindergarten idea originally signified; that 
the mother should learn how to care not only for her 
own children, but for every other child in the neigh- 
borhood, as well. 

Indeed, for the better safety and prosperity of 
their own children, if for no other reason, the whole 
neighborhood of mothers should be vitally concerned 
in the bringing up of every child in it, without dis- 



THE NEWLY BORN 57 

tinction as to social or other disparities. In this re- 
spect no one liveth or can live unto self alone. Con- 
tagion next door or bad habits or loose thinking may 
be more dangerous in the end, than when in one's own 
home. 

In addition to the special studies and readings, 
the mother should early and sedulously seek to ob- 
tain for herself the benefit of the broader culture 
which alone gives massiveness as well as definite- 
ness to every effort. Who, for instance, does not 
see that very much if not all of one's everyday 
speech has been and still is largely the outcome 
of habits, perhaps bad habits, formed so early in 
life that memory does not reveal their origin? Thus, 
how many find themselves unconsciously using 
phrases that are neither exact nor elegant, especially 
when under stress or excitement? Indeed, it may, 
and often does take years of more or less unsuccessful 
study and practice to get rid of the vulgarisms and 
slang, if not worse, and inaccuracies, possibly learned 
early in the home and nursery. But all this can be 
avoided and will be avoided very largely, if the 
mother will but unfailingly insist upon herself and 
all the household using language which, no matter 
how simple, is both clean and accurate. Certainly 
this should inspire all concerned to read as often as 
possible such masters in literature as will naturalfy 
give the proper tone to the home speech. Haw- 
thorne, Emerson, portions of the Bible, Hamilton 
Mabie, Longfellow, Tennyson, Addison, Irving, How- 
ells and their like, afford enough for many months' 
reading and conversation that cannot be lightly neg- 
lected, either for profit or pleasure. Much better 



58 HIGHER LIVING 

are these, in every way, than are most of the popular 
dialect stories and phrases so widely in vogue. And 
it is this proper choice of words and phrases which 
should be provided even for the baby, and before it 
has ever pronounced a single word for itself; for it 
should never be forgotten that its quick ear and 
ready mimicry demands and should receive nothing 
less than just such accurate impression and training 
from the very beginning of its ability to fix attention, 
and this until it leaves the home circle to make a 
center of similar influence of its own. 

Yet, after all, it is not specific matters like speech 
that are of exclusive importance. What may be 
called the general tone of the mother-life and of the 
household over which she reigns, although made up, 
as it is, of intangible elements, such as love for whole- 
some ideas, for high aspirations, for unflinching 
right, for noble conduct, or the reverse, is what gives 
the real bent to the infant, as well as to his subse- 
quent personality. Absorptive as a sponge, the 
child continually imbibes from its surroundings and 
grows accordingly. Consequently the mother who 
does her whole duty here must insist upon it that 
not only every sort of vitiating and dangerous influ- 
ence shall be excluded, but that every sort of genu- 
ine substitution shall be amply provided. For she 
should feel as never elsewhere that if even the littlest 
rift in the precious lute is once permitted, it cannot 
be long before all the music actual and possible will 
be discordant. 

But what shall we say, when, as in so many in- 
stances and for sufficient reasons, the mother cannot 
properly perform her duty or cannot direct herself 



THE NEWLY BORN 59 

in all the multifarious duties imposed by her mother- 
hood, as when, in not the very few instances, her 
constitution or health really forbids it; or as when, 
in so many other instances, the mother in the poor 
home must work so hard that she is more or less 
unfitted, or perhaps cannot even get the time either 
properly to care for her child or even to learn how 
to do this; or again, we venture to say, when the 
mother is so ignorant of her duties that she may be 
truly considered more or less seriously dangerous to 
the child's health and life, and yet cannot or will not 
take the trouble to improve? Most certainly, in 
each of these cases, sooner or later the question of 
substitutional nurture and care will have to be con- 
sidered, as affording the only next best thing for the 
child that is practicable. 

Yet, what a tissue of perplexities do we encounter 
in any attempt to consider this ! We see at once 
that what the child really needs is a mother — not a 
nurse; needs her, not only for physical sustenance, 
but for the spiritual impressioning which only from 
every true mother's caress and tone flows into the re- 
ceptive " soft miniature," in sufficient measure. 
Hence, it must appear that whenever a substitute 
is really needed, every care possible should be exer- 
cised in the choice, and that nothing predominatingly 
selfish should be allowed to interfere with securing 
the best possible one to be obtained. Nor does re- 
sponsibility end with this. Having procured as 
good a substitute as possible, it still remains that the 
mother, instead of affording but little more than a 
daily visit to the nursery, should be none the less 
a veritable constituent of it, even more sedulously 



60 HIGHER LIVING 

and influentially than if she sustained the more vital 
relation that full-facultied motherhood requires. 
In no sense should the nurse ever be allowed to take 
the place of anything like a normal mother. Yet, 
undoubtedly, she should be permitted just as truly 
to fill the place of a most important auxiliary, should 
be considered a friend in need, and should be trusted 
in every way, and rewarded according to her recog- 
nized importance as such as well as for her proved 
trustworthiness. 

Obviously, in the choice of such a close companion 
of infancy, health should take precedence. Every 
nurse and governess should certainly have a body in 
which neither tubercle, nor syphilis, nor thin poi- 
soned blood, nor defective assimilation, nor insuffi- 
cient excretion, can be found ; and a mind, likewise, 
in which passionate explosion, or habitual moodiness, 
or too marked caprice can never abide for long. 
In fact, nothing less than a well-bodied, well-blended, 
healthy, joyous, even-minded, youngerly woman, 
should be the standard sought to be realized both 
by employer and employed. Extra wages, extra at- 
tention, self-sacrifice, almost anything should, if 
necessary and possible, be awarded the one who comes 
up to this high standard unmistakably. Moreover 
it is becoming evident that something more than 
full, even healthy, breasts, or expert preparation of 
substitute foods, is needed for the infant being. The 
woman auxiliary should, if possible, have had the 
importance of her calling duly impressed upon her, 
and all its details amply clarified by a course of 
careful instruction in infant physiology, infant psy- 
chology, and probably best of all, in Froebel's 



THE NEWLY BORN 61 

" mother play," or some good substitute for this, 
where the true dignity of child nature and its nur- 
ture is so sympathetically and so intelligently set 
forth. Parents, if able, and communities at large, 
being able, could always well afford to demand noth- 
ing less than such a preparation for the nursery, 
even from the narrowest economic point of view ; and, 
when we consider the child itself, it is not possible 
to calculate the benefit that would accrue from such 
a course, or rightly to evade the ethical imperative 
implied. 

Consequently, whenever the home resources do not 
admit of the employment of a proper mother-substi- 
tute, it should become the business, and most cer- 
tainly it is the business, of someone who can afford 
it, to see that in some practical way this is properly 
and timely done. Wealth in abundance these days 
goes into every sort of showy philanthropy, and has 
its monuments erected in the sight of all, in order 
apparently that due admiration for the philanthro- 
pist may not fail in due season, no matter how ap- 
propriate or otherwise. If we say that this is well, 
how much better, how much more worthy of monu- 
mental notice, may we say it to be, were other wealth 
quietly yet adequately to provide for the proper care 
of infants, especially in the homes where the struggle 
for subsistence is so wearing that necessarily they 
must otherwise suffer seriously not only from what 
is not done, but from almost everything that is at- 
tempted to be done. It is comforting to know that 
in this respect a beginning has in some places al- 
ready been made, and that the idea is rapidly finding 
lodgment in many minds. And what better philan- 



62 HIGHER LIVING 

thropy, what more needed, what more Christ-like, 
what more satisfactory beneficence, than that 
wealthy people everywhere bestir themselves to seek 
out such conditions, and from their full spirit and 
open purse provide for these soft waiflings of the 
world in just this the best possible way! 

And, too, let the same philanthropic wealth go one 
step further and do for the poor mother what ought 
to be done for every mother before her child is born, 
namely: provide, if possible, for her temporary re- 
moval from the noise and crowding and vitiated 
atmosphere of her place of residence to the quiet and 
healthfulness that is perhaps best found in the coun- 
try. No one has yet estimated the influence of 
paved streets and shrieking whistles and clanging 
bells and leaking sewers and gas pipes, and all the 
rest of the so common municipal confusions and 
sources of danger, upon the impressional mother and 
her so rapidly forming child. When we do, we will 
not only hasten to afford them both another and 
more wholesome environment, but we will then find 
that to consider the cost as simply money actually 
saved from expenditure and loss which, later on, 
must have to be estimated in inefficient nerves and 
fragile constitutions, is but the best economic logic 
possible. And then, when her trial hour is over, 
and the mother has returned to her usual duties, how 
much better that competent enterprise shall again 
step in promptly and minister to her and otherwise 
help her in her own home, with her own family around 
her, than to give such exclusive attention to the 
founding and care of institutions, which must neces- 
sarily separate the mother and child and thus remove 



THE NEWLY BORN 63 

the latter from its natural environment. Children 
in institutions, even with much better professional 
care than so many poor homes can give them, are 
often found nevertheless to wilt and wither and die 
to a disproportionate extent, simply because the in- 
stitution is not a home and has not the parent-spirit 
in it. What God hath joined together in the lives 
of mother and child, let man, so far as possible, keep 
together — even though, if need be, at greatly mul- 
tiplied expense and trouble. 

To this very desirable higher ethical and economic 
end, then, let wealth go forth; let unused sentiment 
go forth; let education and skill go forth; let 
victims of ennui and surfeit go forth; not, how- 
ever, in the repelling spirit of patronage, and 
at distances dictated by conventionality or stingi- 
ness chiefly, but with the Christ-hand, close- 
clasping if need be poverty and squalor and ig- 
norance, yes, and vice, to the Christ-heart; and in 
such a friendly yet intelligent manner, that mother- 
hood everywhere shall be made to rejoice and strug- 
gle on and finally conquer, as it always should con- 
quer, and nevermore be left in doubt and decadence 
and defeat, as it now so frequently is. Sir Launfal 
and many of his fellow grail-seekers are needed at 
the very next door neighbors', and for this very pur- 
pose. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE YOUNG CHILD'S HELPFUL 
ACTIVITIES 



The labor we delight in physics pain. Shakespeare 

After this I was conscious of a new feeling, which I 
would have found it very hard to explain then. It was 
not importance, it was not vanity, it was a pleasant feel- 
ing, it lifted the head and gave one patience to bear 
calmly many things that had been very hard to bear. 
I know now it was the self-respect that comes to every 
one who is a bread-winner. clara morris 

Character, though it may be conceived as latent, can 
be presented only energetically as it finds outward ex- 
pression. G. E. WOODBERRY 

A six-year-old child has learned already more than 
a student learns in his entire university course. 

DR. F. A. LANGE 

Each age, each state of life, has its proper perfection 
and a sort of material which is its own. But the most 
learned give their attention to that which it is important 
for men to know, without considering what children are 
in a condition to know. They always look for the man 
in the child, without thinking of what he was. 

J. J. ROUSSEAU 

There is nothing like fun, is there? I haven't any 
myself, but I do like it in others. We need all the 
counterweights we can muster to balance the sad rela- 
tions of life. T. C. HALIBURTON 

The future of humanity lies more in woman than in 
man, and the child is full of its prophecy. 

A. F. CHAMBERLAIN 



CHAPTER VII 

THE YOUNG CHILD'S HELPFUL 
ACTIVITIES 

From the viewpoint of the actual needs of the 
child, as determined by close study of both normal 
and abnormal conditions of development, it seems 
clear that as he grows older he requires to every 
permissible extent the vital satisfaction as well as 
help that can come only through indiscriminate ac- 
tivities in directions suggested both by his spontane- 
ous impulses and ideas within, and by the various 
objects in the outer world of persons and things that 
arrest his attention. This is found to be in accord- 
ance with the experience of all young animals as well 
as children, wherein they are afforded the only pos- 
sibility of ever learning to discriminate and make 
wise choices. The semi-rhythmic, indiscriminate ac- 
tivity of a newly born kitten quickly proves its use- 
fulness, by bringing mother and offspring into just 
those natural relations which discrimination itself 
would prompt in order to assure the proper nourish- 
ment of the latter. The wayward motions of the 
human infantile hands and feet are similarly pre- 
requisite to selective handling and holding and mov- 
ing about, later on. So the busy experimentation 
of the older child is altogether his most prolific 
source of real knowledge. Indeed, it is only as the 
child moves and is permitted to move, that he gets a 

67 



68 HIGHER LIVING 

realistic sense of either himself, other people, or the 
material world around him, or, later on, of the 
proper significance of these either for himself or for 
themselves. 

Hence, the one great law of child growth, which 
should be carefully heeded, is the law of spontaneous 
and responsive activity; that is, the law of expres- 
sion in obedience to inborn tendencies, on the one 
hand, and to external influences, on the other. 
Without suitable expression, the child loses in growth 
even more surely than without suitable impressions. 
Hence into everything high and low, near and far, 
good and bad, useful and useless, painful and pleas- 
urable, does the all important instinct to expression 
obtrude itself, both anticipatively and aggressively. 
If the sphere of this activity is allowed to be wide and 
various, so will be the resulting good ; for everything 
within its boundaries is thus successively investigated 
for whatever it may be worth to the growing organ- 
ism. If its scope is constrained to be narrow, so 
will be the lessened good; for then do the fewer ele- 
ments at hand have to be enlisted over and over 
again, with a yield thus necessarily restricted. But, 
in any case, no matter what for or how conditioned, 
spontaneously does the child-spirit almost unceas- 
ingly strike out in every possible direction, and re- 
spond appropriately, as it may be invited or con- 
strained by succeeding conditions. Owing to the 
vast amount of energy developed from digestion and 
respiration which naturally seeks release, the normal 
child never ceases from seemingly superfluous activ- 
ity ; while from everything without — from the krin- 
kle root of the woods to the topmost apple on the 






THE CHILD'S HELPFUL ACTIVITIES 69 

winter bough; from bird to fish; from rock to sensi- 
tive plant ; from pet to ogres ; from the chance word 
to hardest study; from everything redolent of earth 
to the surest anticipations of heaven, the growing 
organism never fails to gather something that may 
prove itself to be, by just so much, the possibility 
not only of a new sensation, but of fresh ideation and 
new flights of imagination, as well. 

But what shall be, what can be, rightly done with 
all this more or less troublesome activity? Shall it 
be shackled — shall it be made useful — shall it be 
utterly supplanted by quieter devotion to other and 
more conventional forms of development? Undoubt- 
edly, it may much more correctly be said, that every 
time the child's activity is thus too much hindered 
or too widely and permanently deflected, some sort 
of useful growth may be seriously interfered with. 
Yet, also, it can be said, and with equal force, that 
every time such interference is appropriately inter- 
posed, the child is very naturally inspired in turn 
to energize against superfluous and misdirected ac- 
tivity, and so to develop himself more or less in some 
other equally good or better direction. Hence, we 
may believe that the methods most conducive to his 
developmental welfare should include all the privi- 
leges to action possible; but coupled always with 
such sufficient restraint and direction as will serve 
to keep the resulting activities within safe and con- 
structive lines, rather than the reverse. Generally 
speaking, if constitution and health admit of it, va- 
ried activity should be encouraged in every possible 
way. The problem here is not how to suppress and 
annihilate, but how to select and encourage those 



70 HIGHER LIVING 

motorial expressions chiefly which will develop the 
child most fully. That there must needs be a great 
excess of motor activity, in order that the requisite 
growth of the body and the parallel systematic or- 
ganization of the mind may be secured, is supported 
by all that we know both of physiology and of de- 
velopmental psychology. But never does excess im- 
ply necessarily that it should be arbitrarily curtailed. 
Every sort of proper attention to it will depend upon 
whether the excessive motion is due to abundant nu- 
trition and the force that is thus engendered, or to 
a lack of nutrition and the abnormal irritability con- 
sequent upon this. Many a child is overactive, not 
from the over production of force, which should as 
a rule be allowed natural expression, but from an 
actual under production that expresses itself in a 
weak kind of constant motion, which when found 
should always be curtailed if possible, in order that 
irreparable damage may not result. Irritability 
and fidgets are primarily manifestations of innutri- 
tion, or of poisoning, or of fatigue, or of all com- 
bined; and these conditions often require that any 
tendency to excessive motion shall be checked, as well 
as that proper measures shall be taken to relieve the 
child of his irritable inefficiency. Often, careful and 
prolonged study of the given instance will be re- 
quired, before an accurate understanding of the case 
can be had and means requisite for the child's best 
welfare can be accurately directed. For instance, 
a little Italian in the kindergarten proved to be so 
restless, cross and mischievous, that the director had 
decided after a number of weeks' observation that 
for the welfare of the other children she must forbid 



THE CHILD'S HELPFUL ACTIVITIES 71 

his further attendance. A visiting physician ad- 
vised trying a sumptuous bowl of bread and milk 
each morning before the circle was called together. 
This proved to be everything that was needed to 
transform the child-nuisance into a child-pleasure. 
Similar conditions of irritability and excessive mo- 
tion in children of wealthier homes may frequently be 
relieved, simply by substituting digestible and nour- 
ishing food for the ordinary overrich dishes that 
cannot be digested, and consequently leave the child 
starved and poisoned, in spite of perhaps a greedy 
appetite and a correspondingly abundant allowance. 
No consideration of the subject of children's ac- 
tivities whether physical or psychical can serve the 
best purpose, that does not include the almost 
equally important one of antipathy to activity, or, 
in old-fashioned speech, " laziness." When the child 
is found to be naturally indolent, the difficulty of 
overcoming this and establishing something better is 
sometimes almost or quite insurmountable. Never- 
theless, the obligation to persistently try is great; 
for by making him regularly do what he otherwise 
would not do, he gradually develops a systemic ne- 
cessity as well as desire for such exercise; a result 
that in the end may prove to be his most valuable 
safeguard against inefficiency or vice, even. When a 
child who has formerly been active is seen gradually 
to grow idle, one of two things may be sought for: 
either now, for the first time, a latent contrary in- 
stinct has become manifest and dominant, in which 
case regularly enforced duties should be required; or 
else, he is ill and needs extraordinary observation and 
care until a change for the better is noticeable. In 



72 HIGHER LIVING 

the latter case, the utmost skill is often necessary to 
get at the real fact. For many times the disease 
is not more obscure than is the trend of temperament 
toward misleading deception, both organic and func- 
tional; and both disease and temperamental tenden- 
cies are prolific sources of the mistake that allows 
either relaxed discipline or inadequate instruction 
or both to prevail. Certainly, no child that seems 
to be sick or actually is sick should ever be so man- 
aged as to favor growth of habits of feigned illness 
and subsequent laziness that may hamper his life 
forever afterward. Nevertheless, many a one is thus 
hampered all through life, simply because of paren- 
tal ignorance of the real condition, or else, because 
of a want of the grit and knowledge needed for the 
exigency, when first noticeable. Both in children 
and in adults poor health may or may not be a 
proper excuse for idleness ; it all depends upon 
whether real or supposed conditions predominate, — 
conditions that can usually be determined by tech- 
nical skill, only. 

Hence, in general, it ought to be the universal dic- 
tum that every child, — and simply because it is the 
most natural and valuable of blessings, — should be 
brought up to be freely active in respect of certain 
little things it must do regularly, and required to 
do them; likewise from a very early day, it should 
be required to assume appropriate responsibilities 
and to give full account of how they have been met 
to the master-spirit. Nor should any pedagogical 
or legislative notion or act ever interfere with this 
most wholesome means of symmetrical and complete 
development. In this way, and only in this way, 



THE CHILD'S HELPFUL ACTIVITIES 73 

can a child ever learn the vital significance of many 
things — such, for instance, as the value of time or 
money, the uses of labor, of concerted action, of obe- 
dience, of properly looking forward to, and suffi- 
ciently providing for, future needs, and, by no means 
least, of duly harvesting the rewards of legitimate, 
as compared with wayward, activity. Nor are all 
these less truly moral than are certain mental ele- 
ments of development in the child's life, which may 
or may not seem desirable or objectionable to those 
who do not fully know. 

Activity, and especially work, to be most useful 
to the child, should always be so far as practicable 
out of doors, and should likewise be neither unsuit- 
able nor too protracted. Moreover, let the tasks, of 
no matter what nature, be so carefully thought out 
and assigned in such a way, that in no sense shall 
they ever be considered mere drudgery by the normal 
child, but rather a part of the one system of devel- 
opmental culture which is held in highest esteem by 
all. In this, it will be found that every normal child 
can easily be led to take an interest equally with 
those who thus endeavor to guide him. Besides, all 
along there is equal need that much pains be taken 
to correct the miserable fallacies and pessimistic no- 
tions, that have everywhere like barnacles attached 
themselves to the human understanding, in effect 
that work is a curse. Instead of believing or voicing 
this, let it be most joyfully affirmed, even in the face 
of all the traditional croaking, that, if it has been 
said that only by the sweat of the brow everything 
worth being or having is earned, so may it be said, 
with greater emphasis, that the greatest of all known 



74 HIGHER LIVING 

pleasure is simply to work regularly and persistently 
at something that the judgment commends as worth 
while ; and, moreover, that everyone — strong and 
weak, rich and poor, men and women, children and 
adults, — are under the highest moral obligation thus 
to be rightfully and regularly employed in doing 
just this, in some efficient way according to the 
world's needs and privileges. Undoubtedly, " all 
mankind," as Dr. J. G. Holland said, " are constitu- 
tionally lazy." But it does not follow that anyone 
is to act upon this, or that good results generally 
accrue from acknowledging it. On the contrary, it 
must be understood that unto him, even the adult, 
who worketh not, a process of atrophy and decay 
invariably sets in, and must unceasingly continue to 
advance until disintegration of body and mind and 
spirit eventually results. In children there almost 
as inevitably follow undevelopment and consequent 
interference with the execution of every best subse- 
quent purpose or plan. 

In connection with the consideration of the pre- 
vailing ideas concerning the curse attached to work, 
two pictures come vividly to mind. One is Holbein's 
" Plowman," with its barren field, its poor cabins, 
worn-out horses, and with the son of toil himself as 
ragged as he is sodden-faced and heart-cheerless. 
Underneath the picture is this legend : 

" By the sweat of thy weary face, 
Thou shalt maintain thy wretched life," — 

giving thus fit interpretation to the spectral jig that 
grim Death himself is dancing, in order, seemingly, 
but to make the laborer sure of his misery beyond 



THE CHILD'S HELPFUL ACTIVITIES 75 

quibble. In many respects the very common notion 
of the misery and horror of work is here presented. 

Opposed to this is another picture, that of a 
bright October morning when for the first time a 
youth was directed to go to a certain field and 
" strike a furrow " and do a man's hardest work 
without help. But what a memory does the attempt 
include ! Within the first rod the plow-point struck 
a rock, and the young plowman was tumbled head- 
long into the icy mud. By nightfall every muscle 
and bone were tingling with dire ache, and the work 
had been too raggedly done to be worthy of or to 
secure much commendation. But the youth himself 
was certainly neither hopeless nor sodden. Instead, 
he was all aglow with the wholesome satisfaction that 
comes from surmounting difficulties, if never so 
bunglingly. He had taken his place as a man in a 
man's field of work ; and, undoubtedly, snored lustily 
all the night through in fullest justification of the 
effort ! 

Now, what was the essential difference between 
Holbein's pictured plowman and the whistling boy? 
Certainly it is not to be found in the kind of work, 
nor in the rewards thereof. Both were equally dirty 
and otherwise " forbidding " and " lowly " ; and the 
material rewards were not very dissimilar, either. 
The plowman of the conventional picture had his liv- 
ing for his pains and something to wear; the youth 
for his fresh experience had little if anything more 
to show. Nor was the difference in the surround- 
ings. In both instances there were country life, 
country skies and country associations. Neverthe- 
less, there was a difference, and a most significant 



76 HIGHER LIVING 

one. Looking closely, there is no doubt that the es- 
sential difference was to be found in the point of 
view which birth and education had given to each. 
" Happy the man of the fields," said Virgil, so long 
ago, " if he only knew it." This idea in a measure 
the youth had been born and trained to, while the 
Holbein toiler had not. The latter was able to 
gather neither inspiration nor hope nor liking from 
the work he was obliged to do. But the boy had 
been brought up to feel that honest work and its 
resulting achievement were to be considered more or 
less compensatory and satisfying in themselves. 
Moreover, he had always had constantly before him 
the goodly example of a man who actually delighted 
in doing every kind of work as it should be done, and 
in looking back upon such work as the happiness 
best suited to his idiosyncrasy. Need one say that 
this example was sensible, beautiful, and satisfactory 
in all its influence? If so, may it not then be justly 
affirmed, that there has been and is still something 
wrong in the bringing up of so many necessarily 
toiling ones to think that their present lot is only a 
curse and never a blessing? Indeed are we thus 
really doing justice to these toilers, over whom we 
are so apt to groan, and whom writers, and politi- 
cians, and maudling sentimentalists of every class, 
are so apt to pity and coddle? 

Whether this be so or not, one can surely affirm 
that, if honest toil is ever to be generally considered 
worth while, there is but just one way by which this 
may be secured ; — namely, by teaching every child 
from the earliest years that all such idealization is 
the result not of hoodwinking or deceiving oneself 



THE CHILD'S HELPFUL ACTIVITIES 77 

in any sort of way, but simply and fully of proper 
education and corresponding practice from his early 
years on. All children should be brought up to 
think that glamour and trappings and easy-going 
idleness and all manner of embellishment, are by no 
means the chief things to be realized in life, either 
first or last. Let them, instead, be drilled genuinely 
to believe that their own growth and permanent 
vigor of mind and body is something that can come 
only from work honestly and persistently followed 
as long as life itself shall last, and that the outcome 
is above all riches or other considerations whatso- 
ever, and consequently should be made the object of 
the entire life, and enjo} T ed correspondingly. 

Moreover, in order that toil may be properly ap- 
preciated, we should unflinchingly hold before chil- 
dren the vital truth, that all kinds of work are essen- 
tially honorable, or the reverse, simply as we our- 
selves make them so. For instance, the man who 
shovels clay out of the ditch and does it in the right 
spirit, is in fact just as honorable as the artist who 
takes some of the clay and molds it into a beautiful 
statue. As George Herbert says, 

" A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine; 
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
Makes that and th' action fine." 

And so we may say, " milking a cow and doing it 
right is quite as noble as stripping the fruit from 
any tree of knowledge whatsover; that spreading 
fertilizer and preaching a sermon are exactly on a 
par, when rightly considered ; that setting broken 



78 HIGHER LIVING 

bones and propping up an apple tree have equally 
to do with vital matters." Always the child should 
be helped to learn over and over again, if need be, 
that regular daily toil is in itself just as glorious 
as regularly drilling with a musket or wearing an 
epaulette; and that the man down in the hold keep- 
ing the furnace hot enough is just as honorable as 
the Dewey on the bridge giving commands. Indeed, 
the man who aims the gun in a rolling sea and hits 
the mark should be considered as he is, the first-class 
hero every time; and his commander and the public 
with him should have sense enough to honor him as 
such. 

Again, we have a growing need to teach every child 
that country life is just as glorious as that of the 
city. Josiah Strong says the twentieth century is 
to be pre-eminently a century of city life and city 
government ; but he does not promise that either life 
or government will be any the better for it. In both 
country and city alike are those who honor toil, 
simply by their own personal attitude. City people 
whose opinions are worth having regard work well 
done as highly as ever country people do. But there 
are others, many others, who do not. And it seems 
to be the predilection as well as custom of the ma- 
jority of the so-called " leisure classes " to take this 
low-tone view of the subject. Yet how senseless! 
One day a big cow got helplessly stalled in a mud- 
hole, and in the efforts to get her out, everybody 
concerned became just as thoroughly bedaubed as 
was possible. At the moment of their success, there 
came along a load of city people, who were minded 
only to see a quasi-reasonable cause for a good 



THE CHILD'S HELPFUL ACTIVITIES 79 

laugh. Nevertheless, old Bossy had been timely res- 
cued ; and over the mud covering of her rescuers, 
there might have been legitimately laid a robe of 
royal spotlessness. Lucy Larcom working in the 
mills, Charlotte Bronte caring for the sick, Lincoln 
splitting rails, Lydia Maria Child knitting stockings 
that the black man might be helped, as well as all 
their like, are not alone. Every man and woman who 
becallouses hand and bewrinkles cheek in honest toil, 
proves its glory, — not because the work itself is 
glorious, but because the worker doth glorify it from 
within. Our fathers and elder brothers mostly 
sneered when some of their contemporaries urged so 
hard if yet ineffectually that manual labor should be 
raised to a footing with Hebrew and Latin, in our 
schools. Yet how we do rejoice, even extravagantly, 
when it now gets even but a slippery footing here and 
there. William Morris wrote poetry, stitched his 
own books, and bound them, and did all else besides, 
in the true spirit that each kind of work is equally 
glorious. Arthur Prior could exultingly sweat 
through the drudgery of much practice, that he 
might make the common breath of man vibrant with 
the spirit of the "Blue Bells of Scotland" and 
" Home, Sweet Home." Today we have the picture 
of John Burroughs in his Riverby Vineyards, toiling 
through the variable weather in a halo of as great a 
glory as ever came through his writing about birds 
and poets and men and woods. Edward P. Powell, 
with all his literary productiveness, is never more 
glorious than when engrafting a tree, grubbing on- 
ions, or chirping back to brotherly calls from the 
birds overhead. 



80 HIGHER LIVING 

And this is the spirit which should be made to 
suffuse and infuse all the little tasks of the child. 
We work because it is work that constitutes the very 
highest object in life. We are to work aright be- 
cause we will thus not only learn to like to work, 
but will realize the very highest results of our labor 
attainable. We are to work towards these results 
because in them we are to find all the potency and 
realization of our very best-being. In fact, all 
Higher Living is active working for the realization of 
high purposes. Incidental to this comes the night of 
sweetest sleep, the morning of unsullied hope, the oc- 
casional privilege of holy meditation and culture, 
the joyous recreation and the satisfactory uplift. 
To deprive a child of the teaching and the practices 
which lead to this, is to leave him unprepared to 
make any sort of life very much worth while, and the 
highest life an almost utter impossibility. 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE SOCIAL NATURE 



There is hardly any contact more depressing to a 
young, ardent creature than that of a mind in which 
years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank 
absence of interest or sympathy. george eliot 

Social sunshine and young companions were necessary 
to the growth of a nature which had a ready pleasure in 
all the pleasant things of life, and which would best 
get from the summer of joy the strength of battle with 
such wintry storms as life might bring. 

S. WEIR MITCHELL 

Talk as you will about principle, impulse is more at- 
tractive, even when it goes too far. The passions of 
youth, like unhooked hawks, fly high, with musical bells 
upon their jesses, and we forget the cruelty of the sport 
in the dauntless bearing of the gallant bird. 

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW 

We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a 
few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation, 
while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the 
boundaries that reach unto ours. edith wharton 



CHAPTER VIII 
THE SOCIAL NATURE 

Recent studies seem to show that the social nature 
has its origin in imitation and especially in drama- 
tization of the lives of other persons. In support of 
this, note the young child's " walking like papa " 
and " sitting like mamma," his efforts to reproduce 
tones and gestures, his unconscious mimicry of facial 
expressions, moods and dispositions, his concrete 
playing of many parts and working out of many 
ideas, and the big, strutting accounts of the self and 
all its doings. These are but evidences of a process 
in which the self is gradually brought to realize and 
incorporate the lives of other selves, in more or less 
vivid and permanent ways. By this process, the 
child hour by hour receives impressions from one or 
more persons, which thenceforward in succession 
constitute a veritable copy for repeated attempts at 
reproduction, and, finally, for assimilation into his 
own growing self. 

Obviously, the impressions that most naturally 
enter into the copy — the " model complex " — must 
be from those persons with whom he is most inti- 
mately and most frequently associated, and who can- 
not help thus sitting for this composite photograph 
of their personal characteristics, of whatever worth 
to the susceptible child nature they may actually be. 
If these are of good people and truly sociable, then 

83 



84 HIGHER LIVING 

is there rapid and commendable development on the 
part of the assimilating child. If otherwise, then is 
the result meagre, perverted, or otherwise unsatis- 
factory, and the child is left to enter upon the next 
stage of life, where sociability plays an even much 
more important part, hindered by just this serious 
lack of preparation for its extended realization. 

Through sociability the child learns to compare 
personalities, to generalize concerning them, to judge 
of their various individual traits, to feel characteris- 
tically toward others, and to conduct himself ac- 
cordingly. Hence, as a source of constructive eth- 
ics, the social nature of children and its exercise is 
second to no other concern; while, in so far as the 
more wholesome joy of living is concerned, the truly 
social being is the only one who is prepared to realize 
this in any very satisfactory degree, whatever. In- 
deed we may accept it as a dynamic maxim, that 
all the social aspects of human nature depend on the 
social environment. To the furnishing of this en- 
vironment, therefore, in most accurate and useful 
feature, it should be the endeavor of parents and 
every one concerned with the care of the children, 
to give generously of their own time and skill. Let, 
especially, the parental nature itself be made and 
kept as rich as possible, and always at the disposal 
of children's appropriating natures, in order that 
these may become enriched accordingly. Nothing 
is more needed than that parents shall study, not 
how to entertain and amuse their children so much 
as how to be the model-complex after which the in- 
terests of their children can best be formed. Ought 
not this alone to be entirely sufficient to awaken the 



THE SOCIAL NATURE 85 

deepest interest in and endeavor for this phase of 
child-culture? The imperative certainty is this: 
Be cheery, be good, be hopeful, be stimulative, be 
instructive, be genuine, be companionable to every 
child, in every real sense ; nothing less than this is 
just or satisfactory. 

Nor should it be unheeded, that children them- 
selves furnish scarcely a secondary element in the 
educational luxuriance and tone of their own en- 
vironment. There is evidence everywhere that, in 
order that children shall not actually hinder and 
damage one another, they should never be together 
for long without the presence of older people who 
may understand this possible danger, and so be able 
quietly to obviate it. Moreover, that this prevision 
should be held to be just as necessary in respect of 
churches, and picnics, and dances, etc., as it is of 
homes and schools, and that the utmost care to elim- 
inate or at least carefully to guard against the influ- 
ence and practices of certain " black sheep " that 
are to be found in almost every group before they 
have had a chance to teach their blackness to others, 
should be everywhere peremptorily exercised, are 
some of the conclusions necessarily derived from an 
extensive study of the social nature of children, and 
of the forces that develop this nature, either for 
good or for ill. And so we may say with reference 
to the unfortunate ones who by nature are untrust- 
worthy. These, too, should receive very especial 
attention, in order that they themselves may not only 
be given right tendencies and habits before it is too 
late, but likewise prevented from becoming serious 
sources of danger to others. 



86 HIGHER LIVING 

This in turn leads naturally to a helpful consid- 
eration of that which weighs so heavily upon many 
people's minds, — the instinctive tendency on the 
part of the children, younger or older, to devote an 
undue proportion of time to play and to the sup- 
posed " naughtiness " that is closely associated with 
this. 

In one of Thomas Nast's Christmas pictures, 
Santa Claus is represented as sitting at a desk, on 
which are two piles of letters. One, reaching well 
towards the ceiling, is labeled, " Letters from 
Naughty Children's Parents " ; the other, of com- 
paratively moderate height, " Letters from Good 
Children's Parents." On the wall are seen two pic- 
tures, " Naughty Children," in which two romping 
youngsters are having a jolly good time, and " Good 
Children," in which a little boy and girl are sitting 
in a most Sunday-like rigidity, with toes turned in, 
hands folded, and faces fairly wooden with ultra- 
pious precocity and demureness. 

The picture, in its entirety, undoubtedly presents 
the older conception of what " naughtiness " and 
" goodness " in children ought to be considered as 
most truly consisting. Goodness has, until re- 
cently, been ascribed to quiet, comfortable, industri- 
ous people, and to these almost exclusively ; while to 
him who is boisterous, stirring and playful to the 
brim, the term " naughty " has been quite as com- 
monly given. Especially has the child or adult who 
prefers play to work been thus ignominiously desig- 
nated. 

But more recent studies and discussions seem 
agreed in finding that it is quite right for the child 



THE SOCIAL NATURE 87 

to play, and that the adult would as a rule be much 
better off were he to play much more than he com- 
monly does. This denotes a decided change of 
knowledge and opinion within these more recent 
times. Always, heretofore, it has been rather gen- 
erally held, especially in certain neighborhoods, that 
the instinct to play was to be considered simply as 
one of the useless characteristics of children, and on 
most occasions to be silenced and superseded as soon 
as possible; while, so far as adults are concerned, 
only the " sports " and possibly the " leisure 
classes " were expected to have much to do with play, 
and always with sure results of lowered dignity and 
moral tone. Until very recently, the higher ideal 
of life has been supposed to require expenditure of 
energy in work, if necessary, if not, then in idleness ; 
and always in as serious and sober a manner as cer- 
tain social and ethical but conventional standards 
require. 

The recent change in knowledge and opinion has 
come from skillful investigations of the animal and 
child natures, and from noting the very important 
part that play has in their fullest development. It 
has been seen that the child who is never or seldom 
allowed to play, either is stunted or perverted in 
some one or more important respects, or else is apt 
to explode unreservedly and destructively as soon 
as the repressing influence is once removed. On the 
contrary, it is being found out that the child who is 
allowed to play unrestrained a reasonable propor- 
tion of his time, is sure to develop better muscles, 
quicker, more accurate susceptibility and adaptabil- 
ity, and even a much wider and truer knowledge of 



88 HIGHER LIVING 

persons and tilings, than is possible to his quieter 
brother; moreover, that his disposition is sunnier, 
his spontaneous vigor greater and his attitude to- 
ward life saner and wholesomer, and other things 
being equal, his moral and spiritual safety and prog- 
ress is better assured. 

Based upon this discovery that the sportive child 
does better than the precociously quiet or ever- 
repressed one, is the no less practical inference that, 
if adults would only allow themselves to become in 
this respect once again as little children, they, too, 
would naturally continue to grow more symmetrical, 
more highly adaptive and more wholesome and pros- 
perous in every good way, than now. If this be true, 
it follows that Higher Living has its right to demand 
of every one a certain proportion of time for play 
without incurring any sort of implication that it ca- 
ters to a peculiar fad, or should bear any sort of 
odium. 

Before we can unreservedly assent to this, how- 
ever, we must see play as it really is, and also what it 
really does for the participants. In childhood, play 
is simply a rather universal form of spontaneous ex- 
pression, which, simply because it is instinctive and 
spontaneous, knows no restraints or regulations, save 
those that are developed in the course of the play 
itself, or happen to be imposed by the demands of the 
law and order that essentially belong to the play. 
Its main course is along the simple lines of the freest, 
even the wildest expression of the individual selfhood ; 
and it is not until after this has been experienced 
over and over in multitudinous ways, that slowly 
there supervenes the consciousness of certain more or 



THE SOCIAL NATURE 89 

less definite constraints and restraints, which in 
course of time are recognized as coming from the de- 
mands of the socius, and as imperatively necessary, 
in order that two or more may play successfully to- 
gether. Growing out of this, is the preparatory so- 
cial discipline which at last serves as the foundations 
of very much indeed that is to be self-directive in 
after life, and for which no substitute can ever be 
conceived, or even expected. 

In after years, however, it is seen that these foun- 
dations need to have a kind of superstructure built 
upon them for which play itself does not provide, 
namely, the consciousness of a serious purpose to 
accomplish some end in life worth while, either to the 
individual himself, or to the race, or to both. Play 
of itself, not vividly suggesting such a serious object 
in life, does not further tend to build character very 
extensively after its special childhood offices have 
been fulfilled. In fact, in older people it often tends 
simply to open the doors of seriousness to many 
marauders of a questionable nature, which, sooner or 
later, defile both the player and his play. No adult 
can engage over extensively in sports of any kind, 
without begetting a sort of restive or indifferent atti- 
tude to the higher demands of life, if not a most dire 
confusion as to the real meaning of work and the edu- 
cation that grows out of it. Adult play so easily de- 
generates into a mere habit of play, and so soon 
comes too fully to occupy the attention it mystifies 
and degrades, that one needs only to be a cautious 
observer and thinker, to be obliged to admit some 
serious questions as to whether what is now being 
so strenuously lauded may not sometime have to be 



90 HIGHER LIVING 

criticized quite as strenuously because of the harm 
that so frequently results. The fact is, play like 
any other form of expression, is valuable or not, just 
to the extent to which it is intelligently directed. 
Wanton surrender to the requirements of otherwise 
idle enthusiasts, who sit unseemly hours at indoor 
games, or who neglect duties in order that outdoor 
sports may be correspondingly encouraged or en- 
joyed, or who become more skilled in play than in 
some useful calling, is not more conducive to Higher 
Living than is any other sort of wanton losing or 
misdirecting oneself. The real worth of life is self- 
growth in order that others may be helped to grow, 
too. Play, or enjoyment of play, is a means to this 
only as it is kept within constructive limits, and gen- 
erally needs to be thoroughly subordinated in order 
to be even this. Like the appropriate dessert at 
table, in its place, play is not only permissible but 
eminently useful. To trust to it however for full nu- 
trition of spirit, is as fallacious now as heretofore. 

In its place, however, but mostly as the legitimate 
alternative of work and study, let play l?oth for child 
and adult be everywhere encouraged. Moreover, let 
it be just as influentially held that both child and 
adult should, so far as possible, play much together. 
The child certainly needs the guiding influence of the 
adult, especially if this be born of the right spirit, 
and the adult just as certainly needs the leading in- 
fluence of the child's native instinct to freedom and 
abandon. Separated, the adult's play rapidly tends 
to degenerate into some form of gambling; and the 
child's, into distaste for anything else but play. To- 
gether, a better tendency and equilibrium on the part 



THE SOCIAL NATURE 91 

of both is much more likely to be secured and main- 
tained, than otherwise. At any rate, this is what the 
requirements of Higher Living, as now conceived, 
would seem to be: guidance of the child through his 
play to an appropriate conception of life's serious 
possibilities and needs; and, leadership of the adult 
back to his child nature, with all the softening and 
sweetening which naturally accrue from this. Thus 
conceived and experienced, play may progressively 
become a true help toward the higher life of everyone. 



CHAPTER IX 
EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 



If the mind which rules the body, ever forgets itself 
so far as to trample upon its slave, the slave is never 
generous enough to forgive the injury, but will arise and 
smite its oppressor. Thus has many a monarch been 
dethroned. h. w. longfellow 

Perhaps the age will bear it if for once we do leave 
our inveterate presupposition of man's innate corruption 
unregarded, and dare let self-expression, trained as it is 
through a long growth of ennobling and Christianizing 
ideas, be large and untrammelled. genung 

The object of education is, or ought to be, to provide 
some exercise for capacities, true direction for tenden- 
cies, and through this exercise and this direction to fur- 
nish the mind with such knowledge as may contribute to 
the usefulness, the beauty, and the nobility of life. 

JOHN TYNDALL 

The object of education should be commensurate 
with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to 
teach self-trust ; .to inspire the youthful man with inter- 
est in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; 
to acquaint him with the resources of his own mind; 
and to teach him that there is all his strength, and influ- 
ence him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which 
he lives. ralph waldo emerson 

And her (The Earth's) designs are those 
For happiness, for lastingness, for light. 

GEORGE MEREDITH 

Minute knowledge is pursued at the expense of large- 
ness of mind, and riches at the expense of comfort and 
freedom. george santayana 



CHAPTER IX 

EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 

Closely allied to children's incessant activities is 
the penchant to aggressive inquiry. Who has not 
quailed before the deep, searching questions of the 
child? — who has not been perplexed, crossly tired 
out and despairing, because of them? Yet here as 
almost everywhere else, not repression but direction 
is the law. Never repress the desire to know; for 
just when the question is asked is the surest time for 
the child to learn and remember the proper answer. 
If the specific question cannot be answered at all, say 
so decisively, and not equivocally, or evasively, or by 
referring it to some realm of mystery. Likewise, if 
not able to answer at present, say so ; yet, out of due 
respect to the serviceable instinct itself, be sure to ex- 
press a proper interest in the subject and especially 
the hope that sometime you may have an opportunity 
to learn, and will then answer; and remember re- 
ligiously to make good every such promise of future 
enlightenment and instruction. It may be worth 
miles of travel, or hours of research, or of deepest 
thinking, or of sage instruction, simply to prepare 
one's self amply and accurately just for this; for 
upon it and the subsequent reflection prompted by 
it may hinge the child-man's whole future weal or 
woe. In this way, almost more than in any other, 
can the parent or teacher keep the confidence of 

95 



96 HIGHER LIVING 

children, help them to the most useful bits of learn- 
ing, and, better than this, inspire them to habits of 
accuracy as well as integrity. As soon, however, as 
the child is old enough, instead of furnishing an 
answer offhand, he should be shown how to get one 
out for himself, and thus learn the highest of all arts, 
that of self-dependence and self-discovery and self- 
application. 

The trouble too frequently nowadays is, that most 
children have every manner of help so generously 
provided for their accommodation, that they do not 
learn to solve their own difficulties or to overcome 
them. Indeed, much could be said absolutely in fa- 
vor of even going back to the old-time home and 
school, where children simply had to work out their 
own progress or never realize it at all. Yet, it is 
truer to say, that it is neither no help nor superflu- 
ous help that they really need; but always the right 
kind of help, at opportune moments, even for the 
truly unanswerable questions that grow out of con-? 
tact with persons and things and books, or that in- 
evitably arise in the field, at the circus, at church, 
everywhere; and that will never be half answered 
even, until the child by his own investigations has 
gotten it out fully for himself. Ready at hand 
answers to every inquiry do not help him at all cor- 
respondingly to the truer way. Likewise, it ought 
to be the rule that when answers are once given or 
ascertained, they should be frequently referred to 
afterwards at proper times and in proper connec- 
tions, and thus be fixed so indelibly in the mind that 
they will become a part and parcel of the child's 
furnishing and power forever. Indeed, there is a 



EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 97 

loud call in this connection for the fostering of a 
little more conversational freedom as well as whole- 
some intellectuality than is usual in the home, and a 
little more companionship along lines not of sensuous 
attachment but of ideational clarification and sup- 
port, than is now commonly the case anywhere. For 
this is exactly what childhood so active and so in- 
quiring needs and should not be denied. Nor 
should this provision be made for so-called " spirit- 
ual " results simply or chiefly. The old-time Sunday 
companionship over the Bible was one-sided, but yet 
was thoroughly cultural in many goodly ways. Let 
the newer-time comradeship be — why not ? — over 
all the books and comings and goings and puzzles 
and facts and even fads of the child's everyday 
life. This would be living with these little folk in 
all the unfolding of their lives to a degree not often 
realized; for which later they will in turn live with 
us in sweetest devotion, as we reach forward to the 
higher life of our young-old day, and try to grow 
sweet again ourselves. 

Muscular activity and verbal inquiry are of one 
and the same nature, in that they both express the 
spirit of investigation, which, as already said, is on 
many accounts the most usefully promotive charac- 
teristic of the self. Hence, aside from exceptional 
instances where the activity is only an expression of 
irritability, or the questioning only a lazy quizzing 
habit, both these developmental agencies of the self- 
hood are always to be respected according to their 
real rather than their apparent worth; and, like- 
wise, are persistently to be turned into and kept 
within channels that are useful as well as gratifying. 



98 HIGHER LIVING 

For it sometimes happens that even adults, who may 
be both active and quizzical enough for every con- 
ceivable purpose, still get little or no lasting results 
from their efforts that are of any use. Many times 
such people become and remain simply bores, to be 
tolerated just as far as necessity or interest requires, 
and no further. When this promises to be the case 
with children, it should He the close concern of par- 
ents and all other culturists not only to discounte- 
nance, but to attempt to break up, a habit which 
may so readily become a nuisance and in its stead 
naturally to create the serviceable, useful habit of 
right inquirj^, which may result in so much good. 
This can be done most effectually by always requiring 
strict definitions of both the language and conduct 
concerned, a most industrious self-seeking for the 
right answer, and then demanding in conclusion a 
thorough account of what has really been ascertained 
or done. The spirit of inquiry and the excess of 
activity may thus be disciplined to requisite propor- 
tions, and yet not be suppressed or disorganized in 
the process of so doing. The principle underlying 
every correct management of these fundamental 
traits of childhood is, that the child shall be left to 
be as self-active and consequently as self-realizable 
as possible, while at the same time he is helped ma- 
terially and- persistently in this vital process by 
proper instruction and direction. 

This principle, properly conceived and applied, 
marks the difference between " education " and 
" schooling " — between timely growth and untimely 
arrest or perversion of growth at premature points. 
And this holds just as true of adults as of children. 



EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 99 

Not suppression and prohibition, but direction and 
regulation, are the prime conditions of all true and 
permanent growth, whether early in life, or later. 

This being so, it is profitable to consider even 
more carefully still that which characterizes the fun- 
damental life principle more than anything else, and 
consequently needs careful attention all along, 
namely, humanity's untiring effort to express itself 
in accordance with the laws of its being. The old 
definition of life was this : " The sun of all the forces 
which oppose the tendency to death." " Forever 
alive, forever forward," would seem to have been 
written in the heart of all organic matter, from the 
very first. Nothing that seems otherwise — inor- 
ganic, mechanical, subversive or overwhelming — can 
successfully cheat life of its tendency to expression, 
without itself damaging the integrity of its own his- 
tory, many times beyond repair. " I will overcome, 
I will create," saith this Lord of the universe; and 
happy those only who recognize the fact, and will- 
ingly conspire with Him in the right way. No, we 
do not live by repression, but by expression of nearly 
everything if not all that is within us. This is the 
way we most truly bless the holy name of Him who 
is life itself. " But, suppose I am weak, and sinful, 
and selfish, and contrary-minded to the rest of the 
world?" you ask. "Would you say express your- 
self, notwithstanding? " Well, as a living cricket 
is better than a dead canary, so would I say: Be 
from your very soul alive! There is a place for all 
genuine, truly human expression, and it is always met 
half-way by a no less truly divine greeting and help. 
Better be well in tendency of soul, even with the pos- 



100 HIGHER LIVING 

sibility of making a mistake or with certain con- 
tumely and neglect just ahead, than always to be 
dying, even in the midst of ever so satisfying com- 
placency and praise. This implies that almost the 
greatest need of every hour is the courage that does 
not come by inspiration, but by the glow of a contin- 
uous expression of one's self. And so in regard to 
most of the circumstances that are felt persistently 
to cramp and hinder and exhaust ; only the heart that 
has been wont to express its own strength fully, and 
has continuously grown by this most natural al- 
though painful exercise to a stature which is capable 
of enduring all and of transforming all into added 
strength still, is really stayed when moments of stress 
come. 

For want of proper expression then, — expression 
of body, conduct, thought-energizing, heart-loving, — 
many people grow but narrow, crabbed, disgruntled 
and sepulchral; and of such, the world is full, — 
people who have been made so mostly in obedience 
to notions and practices, conceived and perpetuated 
by eccentrics and cowards of every species imaginable 
and of every age of the world. But the day is at 
hand, when opportunity fully to express the hidden 
springs within must be considered the wisest revela- 
tion of God and the highest achievement of man. At 
any rate, the. lesson of the inner life of very many 
people is mostly, that repression has been the fruit- 
ful breeding place of all that is untoward in their 
natures ; and that expression in some wholesome, 
hearty, lawful way would have been just the espe- 
cial preparation and exercise of both body and spirit 
that would have assured permanent realization of 



EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 101 

health and prosperity. It is said that old iEscula- 
pius was rewarded for his skill in curing the king's 
daughter by gift of the daughter herself. Only ex- 
press the self skillfully, and the reward, if not a 
king's daughter, shall certainly be one's own royal 
selfhood, in fullest measure. 

Hence, do there awaken great human longings 
that would naturally carry one above or outside the 
pale of common notions and endeavors? Let there 
be no hesitancy in trying to see what this means, nor 
in making rational attempts to realize it, providing 
always that the one way opens which does not lie 
over the hearts of the greater humanity. Has 
someone a seemingly new idea, aspiration, or method, 
in respect of no matter what subject or undertak- 
ing? Let him boldly announce it, even though it 
bring scorn and desertion from his best beloved. 
There has never yet been a progressive or perma- 
nent thought, or a plan or a work, but that has been 
born in spite of conventional opposition, repression 
and prohibition. Yet, has not the world finally and 
always gloriously crowned those who have thus dared 
to declare their unique insight and realize its guid- 
ance? Again, doth the burden of the commonplace, 
whether authoritative or dogmatic, or vaguely 
threatening, bear thee ever down, even unto suffoca- 
tion and faintness? Let the movements of God in 
thine own soul — so thou art sure they be His and 
not basely thine own, — f reel}'' have sway ; the moral 
order, the intellectual reign, the physical need, will 
not be jeopardized, but restrained and yet fulfilled, 
as never before. Is it sickness either of body or 
mind, or of both, that comes and crushes, even when 



102 HIGHER LIVING 

you feel that all within is ready to burst forth in 
something you are sure the world needs, did it but 
have a chance? Let the smiles of heaven encourage 
you while you nevertheless show forth your very 
best; the dreadful annihilation will never come, you 
may be everlastingly sure! 

But how can we properly express ourselves if we 
neither are rightly educated for so doing, nor ever 
find ourselves in a place and occupation which 
rightly admits of it? Taking the world as it goes, 
it may be said that at least a very large proportion 
of persons are neither prepared for the life they ought 
to live, nor engaged in the work they are properly 
endowed for doing, nor living where they can really 
express themselves according either to their own 
natural bent or to the best conventional culture. In 
all these instances, therefore, there is to be found 
not only failure of adequate expression and loss of 
all the genuine development and happiness that de- 
pend upon this, but a miserable stoppage of true 
growth as well as a progressive sickening of the 
whole being from body to soul, from which there has 
necessarily resulted listlessness, despair, and the 
questionable conduct that oftentimes is beyond res- 
cue or repair. In view of this, there should be no 
hesitancy in arriving at the supreme decision that 
the most strenuous endeavor on the part of all the 
generations, to find the growth, the work, yes, the 
hope, which shall best offer opportunity for the full- 
est possible expression of the life within, is abso- 
lutely imperative. Ethical feeling and conduct as 
well as health and longevity, depend more on this 
one thing than has ever yet been thought of in our 



EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 103 

vital philosophy, seemingly. Happiness is certainly 
not very truly realized without it; and for want of 
it, hope wilts by the way long before anything like 
just and satisfactory fruition can possibly be 
realized. 

When, however, everything possible has been said 
in favor of developing forms and ways of expres- 
sion as among the best means of education, it yet 
remains to be said just as emphatically, that in 
almost every case the impulse toward expression 
needs none the less to be directed by superior adult 
wisdom and knowledge; needs to be intellectualized 
as well as allowed to remain impulsive and emotional 
— needs, in fact, to be more or less helped to emerge 
from its native waywardness and excess into the pur- 
posive expression of a preconceived motive and plan 
for living. For it is this purpose and plan which 
really constitute the difference between the poten- 
tialities of the child and the young animal. The 
latter cannot be made to go very far in the way of 
development, by any means, try as we may; the 
former can be almost indefinitely developed, espe- 
cially in capability for looking ahead, and for ener- 
gizing in such activities as will not only prepare for 
adaptation to recurring fixed conditions, but like- 
wise to all sorts of variable conditions, as well. 

Hence all along with proper encouragement of ex- 
pression, there should be systematic endeavor to de- 
velop a counteracting power, the one which in 
psychology is called " inhibition," and which, when 
properly developed, constitutes the real power of 
self-direction, or, as Matthew Arnold would say, 
" distinction." Early in life there is nothing of the 



104 HIGHER LIVING 

kind save that which is automatic obedience to the 
restraints and constraints of the outer world. The 
babe reaches for the flame, and stops only when 
burned or otherwise checked. He cries and strug- 
gles to grasp the moon, but learns that it is beyond 
reach. He pounds the mother-face mercilessly un- 
til he is made to desist. Later the child demands 
that everything shall be his own, to find however that 
others not only demand, but keep their own in spite 
of him. Then he seeks to acquire everything by 
stealth or barter, but soon to realize that in either 
case he is checked by superior watch-care and skill. 
Does he indulge himself in anger or other unsocial 
moods? The clenched fist, or irresistible grasp, or 
stern command, or sweet admonition, irrevocably 
limits the extent and kind of the outburst, and he 
yields accordingly. 

And so it is, and it will be, from first to last, with 
every impulse to expression. There is simultane- 
ously and necessarily experienced more or less fully 
the counter-check of environmental conditions, until, 
either somewhat suddenly or by slower steps, the 
child becomes conscious of a power within himself, 
both to hold his impulses in check and to direct them 
to more acceptable ends. This is Inhibition, that 
which is often said to be the essential characteristic 
of will, as well as the vital element of the moral na- 
ture. To illustrate: A five-year-old boy at the end 
of his breakfast begged for a piece of pie. His 
mother assured him that he had eaten enough and 
did not need it. But the youngster insisted, and 
finally secured the gratification of his unpremedi- 
tated impulse pieward ; soon to find, however, that 



EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 105 

his appetite was already cloyed. Slyly leaving the 
table and passing out of doors, he gave his pie to 
his pet dog and at once returned. " Where is your 
pie? " asked the mother. " I ate it up," he replied. 
" Come here," was the command. And then, with 
eyes all charged with motherly tenderness, with con- 
scious responsibility, and with heart overflowing with 
love thoroughly divine, the mother simply held her 
boy by the hand, looked into his eyes until his very 
soul was pierced, and gently in a voice attuned to 
every celestial harmony, very quietly said, " Smith S " 
And this was enough. From that moment the boy 
not only knew there was a right and a wrong, but 
also that he possessed two kinds of power ; one to let 
himself go, and the other to hold himself in check. 

This power by which the child holds himself in 
check — this inhibitory power — needs renewed at- 
tention in the light of modern psychology. In the 
older scheme, it was taught principally by enforced 
prohibition — by flogging, by scolding, by dire 
threats. At the basis of all this there was super- 
stition of almost every kind imaginable, or if not 
this, then an ignorance or notion of ownership or 
tyranny which certainly is no longer excusable. 
People severely whipped children, put them in dark 
places, deprived them of natural pleasures, set them 
to committing long Bible chapters, and all the rest, 
in order either that their souls might be saved ex- 
actly in accordance with schemes entrenched in im- 
pressions and practices thought to be too logical 
and vital to admit of gainsaying by anyone, or else 
in order that the family name might not become be- 
daubed and bedraggled through the waywardness of 



106 HIGHER LIVING 

its children, whose wills had not been " broken." 
Closely analyzed, this method was conceived and 
determined, not nearly so much by accurate knowl- 
edge of child nature and its real needs, as by adult 
nature for adult ends ; and, was almost exclusively 
based upon premises subjectively assumed and de- 
ductively reasoned from. Its prime object was to 
make adults who could control passion and keep 
them from falling into vice. And it can be said in 
favor of it, that some of the strongest, best and 
most useful, — albeit they were likewise inflexibly 
narrow, — people of past history, was the result. 

The newer idea, that which is slowly materializing 
into a plan, is based upon study of the child nature 
itself, as it passes through its successive stages of 
evolution. It seeks to know what the child's own 
natural tendencies in this respect are, and to find 
the best means for so cultivating these that from 
period to period the growth shall be as natural as 
possible, while at the same time it is being molded 
into the best form possible. That this will prove to 
be the truer, more useful plan seems sufficiently evi- 
dent already. But while the method is developing, 
it will not be strange if from time to time certain 
bizarre perversions, if not flat failures, will have to 
be recognized. The household and school pendulum 
has a tendency to tick one-sidedly. And now the 
greater sound seems to be on the side where lack of 
useful prohibition is discerned. If the old plan in- 
cluded too many prohibitive measures and expected 
too much of them, it does not follow that the best 
laid scheme of modern expressional education will 
as yet necessarily and universally result in full de- 



EXPRESSION AND INHIBITION 107 

velopment of the power of inhibition, which is so 
requisite at every step of life. However, it must be 
borne in mind, that stopping and backing up are as 
essential in human affairs as in mechanics. A loco- 
motive that could only go ahead and that always 
went ahead, would soon find the limit of its useful- 
ness. The brain, nervous system, muscles and or- 
gans, belonging to the child, have need to be fur- 
nished with power to check and deflect, as well as to 
go ahead. Impulse that is not inhibited does not 
lead to will power, but to willfulness instead. And r 
natural impulse, untamed and not self-directible, is 
not to be encouraged too far, to say the least. 

Throughout the entire stage of childhood, then, 
there should be a most persistent effort to cultivate 
this high characteristic of human distinction — the 
power of right inhibition. Not, it must be urged, as 
formerly, by mere brutal prohibition ; but rather by 
proper guidance while the stress of impulsive ex- 
pression is on. In the midst of an anger fit, for in- 
stance, or of some shocking experience, such as un- 
expectedly meeting pain or danger, or while the de- 
mands of appetite are rampant, or while inclination 
is toward the wrong object, let the practice be, not 
the abrupt command of prohibition, which if fol- 
lowed may result only in mental confusion and moral 
obliquity, if not ultimately in hysterics or patho- 
logical exhaustion, but rather to incite to true inhi- 
bition, by fixing attention upon something else that 
can be legitimately done even at a white heat. Thus 
two boys get to the mad point; then to words, and 
finally to blows. What shall be done? Command 
them to stop? Possibly this at first is exceptionally 



108 HIGHER LIVING 

all that is needed. But this is not all that is usually 
needed, by any means. Either flog the impulsive 
force out of them — an old, poor, heart-and-head 
contracting way ; or, lecture it out of them, a some- 
what higher, yet superficial method that is more 
likely to salve the lecturer's sense of duty than to 
do much for the boys ; or, set them to work to figure 
out how they could have settled their difficulties in 
a decent, self -directive, sober sort of way — the right 
method; one which leads to the development of in- 
hibition every time. 

Not then by prohibition so frequently or so arbi- 
trarily; not by the substitution of ideational calm 
for physical commotion; but by judicious working 
over of the original impulse into another one of bet- 
ter promise and effort ; — this is the way to the 
physical control of the Greek, to the rational control 
of the Scholastic, to the true ethical control of the 
Spirit-born, and so to the highest living yet known. 
Overcome evil with good is, indeed, a long stride in 
advance of thou shalt not do this and that. But 
overcoming is right action; not mere thinking or 
feeling. And such right action leads not to confu- 
sion and rebellion, but to purity of purpose, charity 
of thought, and to the righteousness that is of the 
Most High. 



CHAPTER X 
THE CHILD'S HOME 



Through wisdom is a house builded, 
And by understanding it is established ; 
And by knowledge are its chambers filled 
With all precious and pleasant riches. 

PROVERBS 

You are obliged to give this strange, new life, created 
by your will, the fairest, choicest setting. Your best self 
must be called forth, your highest instincts must reveal 
themselves. The home must be not alone the shelter of 
the body, but the cradle of the mind. 

THE JEWISH VOICE 

In the sight of humanity and reason it is better to erect 
one cottage than to demolish a hundred cities. 

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 

Drove home to Cambridge. The children ran about in 
a kind of strange, wild delight to see again the old fa- 
miliar places. Oh, what a charming house they have 
come back to ! And what delightful associations and 
memories they are unconsciously pressing in their hearts 
to be looked at hereafter. 

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 

A knowledge of the way in which faculties are evolved, 
impressions organized, moral and scientific intuitions 
formed, habits established, and the structure no less than 
the furniture of the mind receives its individual charac- 
ter from the silent and incessant modifications of experi- 
ence, will make parents and teachers keenly alive to the 
incalculable importance of the conditions under which 
the early years of the child are passed, g. h. lewes 



CHAPTER X 

THE CHILD'S HOME 

As the child grows older and the sense organs be- 
come more fully developed and practiced, all the 
impressions from without become more and more defi- 
nite and influential. Hence, with each year it be- 
comes correspondingly important that the home, the 
nursery, the clothing, the furniture, the pets, the 
playthings, the caretakers, the teachers, be all sub- 
jected to a most masterful discrimination, in accord- 
ance with their importance to the child. Remem- 
bering that, like a photographic film, a momentary 
exposure of the absorptive brain to an untoward in- 
fluence may mar or entirely spoil it, it is readily 
seen that the completest carefulness is not too much. 
But it must be remembered, also, that carefulness 
does not mean too exclusive care, in any sense. The 
simple fact is, most young children are apt to be 
too much " cared " for, especially if there be at com- 
mand abundant time combined with an acute sense 
of responsibility. Surely it is not coddling, and 
caressing, and constant attention, that even babies 
need. The mother who hopes properly to care for 
her child by keeping it from everything judged 
harmful, will only half perform the duty devolving 
upon her. Loving care means providing for, as well 
as prohibiting; it means luxurious variety, as well 

111 



112 HIGHER LIVING 

as discriminative rejection; it means freedom, as 
well as limitation. 

Generally speaking, the simpler, more naturally 
fitted the environment is, the better it is, for all this 
period of life. The common " helps," whether in 
forms of cradles, much caressing, bundling about, 
too many people or too many so-called " play- 
things," are apt to hinder the right kind of develop- 
ment rather than help. On the other hand, plenty 
of natural objects, such as household pets (of course 
properly cared for), flowers, shells, minerals, odd 
bits and pieces of wood, cloth, etc., not to forget 
pleasant voices, correct speech and manners and a 
lofty assurance of the household spirit, are all im- 
portant, without end. Above all things, dare to 
give the life-principle within the rapidly expanding 
boy or girl a chance to develop and manifest itself 
naturally and fully. Let the spirit of its own Cre- 
ator have its deterministic way, at least until it is 
noted that some particular change of activity is 
actually needed for its better expression. In this 
way only can the foundations of a truly individual- 
ized personality be laid. Many an adult finds him- 
self still very much of a child in so far as independ- 
ent life is concerned, simply because he was from the 
first trained to be, not self-developing and self-reli- 
ant, but other-reliant and other-developing, instead. 

Hence the firm belief that it is pre-eminently 
fitting that a still further and stronger word than 
ever shall be said in favor of a better idea of home 
and the child's homing, — using this old word in a new 
and possibly more useful sense than has usually been 
the case. True, parents almost everywhere, now as 



THE CHILD'S HOME 113 

heretofore, work and store up, build and exchange, 
go and come, enjoy themselves or not, ostensibly, at 
least, that their children may be well-fortuned and 
happy ; nevertheless, it must still be too often said, 
that this is largely done in order that their own 
objective prosperity may be most certainly assured, 
that certain particular phases of parental selfhood 
and vanity may be most strikingly enhanced, and 
that certain notions of social respectability may 
better be realized than they otherwise would be ; and, 
all this without much real thought as to what the per- 
manent influence upon the unfolding impressionable 
natures of the children themselves will be. Later on, 
however, these same parents often find that, no mat- 
ter how earnestly they may thus have denied them- 
selves, or how much they may now worry, or how 
repeatedly they may command, or how hard the 
skilled governess or kindergartner or other qualified 
teacher may work, it unexpectedly as naturally fol- 
lows that nothing ever really succeeds in even half 
overcoming the perversions and defects that have 
thus so naturally if not so unexpectedly grown out 
of just such early parental indulgence and neglect! 
Recent studies in psychology require us to note 
repeatedly that the proper development of every 
child is governed by two things: first, by a series 
of native impulsions, predetermined by heredity, and 
forever pushing the child along in certain definite di- 
rections ; and, second, by a simultaneous series of im- 
pacts of environment, forever stimulating him and 
deflecting him, but always in strict accordance with 
both mechanical and dynamic law. Everything in 
the immediate surroundings of even the youngest 



114 HIGHER LIVING 

child hinders or helps, according to the relative posi- 
tion and weight of these two series of governing in- 
fluences. Hence, it is seen to follow that every- 
where, among the rich as well as the poor, it is 
needed that what is properly called the " model com- 
plex " shall be so carefully and fittingly made up, 
especially of the home folk, the home furnishings, 
and the intimate neighborhood and social circles, 
that it will be especially adapted always to impress 
the child favorably for imitation and appropriation, 
during every moment of every day. Indeed, the fact 
cannot be too strongly put that, as Professor Bald- 
win says, " The growth of the human personality 
has been found to be pre-eminently a matter of so- 
cial suggestion " ; nor, that as the suggestive model 
complex really is, in respect of all its form, color, 
tone and movement, so exactly, so far as possible, 
will the child, through mimicry and dramatization, 
absorb and assimilate and consequently develop fa- 
vorably or otherwise in many of the most important 
aspects of its being. 

Hence, it is not too much to affirm that the home 
should always be a place where love shall mean some- 
thing more than generous cosseting — shall mean 
even the strictest yet gentlest subordination of indi- 
vidual desire to the higher common good; where 
charity for common error, justice for human weak- 
ness and mercy for human sin, shall not only be sen- 
timentalized, but shall be given that clear under- 
standing and bracing clarity that constitutes 
strength and joy and purity, all in one; a place, in 
fact, which shall be built chiefly for the child, lived 
in for the child, and in which the child shall be com- 



THE CHILD'S HOME 115 

pletely formed, rather than be cultivated as a pet, or 
taught to be a failure, or allowed to become arrested 
at half developed points, or forced to grow irregu- 
larly without let or hindrance; a place altogether 
from which the child shall finally be projected into 
the world with a constructive influence behind him 
that all eternity cannot neutralize. 

In order to have such a home, however, there must 
be, not only a purpose, but a plan, which shall be 
allowed to dominate from the first. And the points 
in the plan which are absolutely essential must in- 
clude, first, location where there is sufficient room, 
neighborhood cleanliness, fresh air and abundant 
light, and as much freedom from external contamina- 
tion as may be possible. No home can be an abid- 
ing success which is not thus founded. Again, the 
house should be located, sized, built, and furnished so 
as to admit of the most companionable use with the 
least care, and at the same time be sufficiently pro- 
tective and restful for each and everyone of its mem- 
bers. Everything about it should be for the family 
that lives in it, rather than for the opinion of the 
neighborhood, or the wider circle that is admitted to 
it upon exceptional occasions and only for short 
periods. A house that hampers the real welfare, 
happiness and growth of its occupants is just to this 
extent seriously faulty. Indeed, how many so-called 
" homes " have need to be most thoroughly remod- 
eled, before anything like the right influence upon 
children can be secured. Houses that are aAvkward 
in size and plan, that require overwork and over- 
expense for their care and keep, that are irritant, 
cheerless, and even dangerous, because of their in- 



116 HIGHER LIVING 

adaptability to human natures and their everyday 
needs, must certainly be considered of this class; as 
must also all of the other houses that are built 
mostly for show, furnished for style, and lived in for 
vanity's sake ; to which may be added those that are 
simply moved into and out of in an almost ceaseless 
round of unhominess and loneliness, if not absolute 
disgust, sooner or later; such a place, for instance, 
as that in which Mr. Howells has successfully repre- 
sented the feelings of his " Mr. March," as he en- 
tered the bric-a-brac apartments where he was 
tempted to the greatest " Hazard of New For- 
tunes " possible, and where one could well conceive 
the idea that home is never, and should never at- 
tempt to be, a mere curiosity shop, but a beautiful 
living-place, with beautiful, truly alive people in it. 

Evidently home is the one place where the father 
can assert an intelligent authority and to better pur- 
pose than anywhere else. Here certainly is where 
he can use his provisional and administrative and 
disciplinary skill to the very best purpose, — can 
see to it that through vanity or presumption he as 
money getter and spender does not attempt too 
much — mortgages kill a home — does not do things 
impulsively, selfishly or ignorantly ; — the child can- 
not, if he lives, fully forgive either of these. In- 
stead of this, the father can study most sedulously 
how he can best plan with greatest wisdom, execute 
judiciously, and help to make a real home — a func- 
tion that will not fail eventually to be worth his 
very best preparation and care, or to give satisfac- 
tions such as nothing else will. 

Nor will the mother fail to remember, that even 



THE CHILD'S HOME 117 

so little a matter as the wrong picture, or the 
wrong kind of paper on the wall, may mar the finer 
qualities of her child forever. We know this to be 
true of books also, and likewise that the wrong 
household everyday temper and methods are just 
as serious. We know, too, that on the other hand, 
proper material surroundings, just as truly as good 
sense, intelligent sweetness, true religion and high 
aspiration, are saving powers beyond comparison, 
and this, simply, because they are persistently im- 
pressive and so become generative and reformatory 
in the right direction. 

Unquestionably also is it equally true that there 
should be no home thought of in which each member 
of the family is not afforded some accommodating 
corner or room, which shall be for individual posses- 
sion and care, and absolutely inviolable. What is 
most needed in every home, is, that each member 
shall always feel thoroughly at home, and shall have 
the divine privilege of cultivating this feeling in 
every legitimate way. Feeling at home oneself is 
the surest guaranty of due respect for the feelings 
of other members of the household ; proper self- 
regard is the basis of proper other-regard. Hence, 
there should be in every home a kind of wholesome 
rivalry to see who can produce by and for himself 
or herself the most artistic, comforting, recuperat- 
ing effects, by the simplest elementary means. A 
few really good furnishings selected for comfort, 
taste and use, eventually give better results than 
hosts of indifferent " pieces " that clutter both 
house and spirit. Think how this proved to be so 
in that home of the " Meyricks " to which " Daniel 



118 HIGHER LIVING 

Deronda " took the sensitive Myra after he had frus- 
trated her effort at self-destruction. 

Such another home also comes to mind here, one 
where there was not only simplicity of manner, but 
meager resources and unpretentious theorizing, and, 
seemingly, had no settled plan whatever; and yet, 
one where, because of the dominance of a vivid sense 
of righteous responsibility, of a high-grade courtesy, 
and of the influence of a far-reaching outlook, each 
member in his or her own individual way, grew into 
that symmetry of character which of itself is the 
assurance of the most faithful, most useful, and, con- 
sequently, most exalted life, that parents can be 
held responsible for. To the blessed influence of 
such a rightly-minded, rightly-administered home, 
no such fortunate member can sing praises too loud, 
or yield tribute too plentiful. And then, in all his 
after life, 

There must be recollections 

Of things not seen on earth, 
Deep nature's predilections, 

Loves earlier than birth, 

and so his satisfaction grows evermore complete. 



CHAPTER XI 
NORMAL AND ABNORMAL GROWTH 



These little bodies will all grow up and become men 
and women, and have heaps of fun; nay, and are having 
it now ; and whatever happens to the fashion of the age, 
it makes no difference — there are always high and 
brave and amusing lives to be lived, and a change of 
key, however exotic, does not exclude melody. 

R. L. STEVENSON 

I remember when I was a child that I used to think 
that a stick of peppermint candy must burn with a con- 
sciousness of its own deliciousness. c. d. warner 

The guardians of the young should strive first of all 
to keep out of nature's way, and should merit the proud 
title of defenders of the happiness and rights of children. 

G. STANLEY HALL 

Trust in human nature. That never deceives. 

MADAME ROLAND 

The causes of our mental structure are doubtless nat- 
ural, and connected, like all our other peculiarities, with 
those of our nervous structure. william james 

Suppose that never in his life, whether spontaneously 
or under the influence of others, he had experienced any 
faint desire of amendment; the reason is, because he en- 
tirely lacks the moral elements and their corresponding 
physiological conditions. ... If nature has laid no 
foundation, given no potential energy, there is no result. 

TH. RIBOT 



CHAPTER XI 

NORMAL AND ABNORMAL GROWTH 

Looking thus closely at the normal human being 
when it has become a child, we see that he has most 
usually been born of parents who are fairly well dis- 
ciplined, healthful, and ordinarily intelligent; has 
suffered no thwarting or perverting accidents during 
infancy, and has been homed in an atmosphere of in- 
dustrious, average contentment; that he is neither 
too large nor too small; is now really a child, and 
not a small adult, and likes everything, without re- 
gard to moral quality, simply because it interests 
him. Such a child goes through its own certain 
necessary phases of growth as well as his peculiar 
diseases, without lingering, injurious results ; gets 
knitted together better and better with each year ; 
learns what is necessary with a fair amount of study, 
and remembers some of it pretty well; but likes to 
play just as well or better, and doesn't mind at- 
tempting anything no matter how hard, providing 
it turns out to be something " jolly." Such a child 
is pretty good when he has to be, but will get over 
the fences whenever the attraction on the other side 
is strong enough. Indeed, he lives mostly in a world 
of his own, in which everything is interesting that is 
new, untried, and especially in everything that has 
motion. His mental processes are now active as 
well as his physical but not as yet stably co-ordi- 

121 



122 HIGHER LIVING 

nated; attention to any one thing is still but mo- 
mentary at the most. His likes and dislikes alone 
determine chiefly whether he returns to and appro- 
priates things of the past or not. He conceives of 
world-problems in terms of household methods and 
ideas ; he estimates everything by the standard of 
possible fun or task; lives in today, but hopes to- 
morrow will be jollier; has no plan of life save the 
plan which each coming minute demands ; eats, 
drinks, sleeps, exercises and is merry, just because he 
cannot help it; and wonders why older people will 
so goad themselves into prolonged misery over mis- 
haps that he forgets in a day. His perspective is 
generally foreshortened, and has room for only a 
few vivid details, and even these are in the fore- 
ground and quickly move aside. As for other 
people, he loves his parents best when they are com- 
panionable, and his teachers when they do not seem 
to be cranks ; he is not one you expect will ever turn 
the world over ; and yet is one who often does it even 
while you are looking to see his fellow do it instead. 
In fact, he is simply a goodly, growing lump of work- 
able material, still needing much, yet fairly safe, 
even when left simply to the ordinary course of 
events. Moreover, if he ever gets astray, he is 
pretty sure to swing back into line again before it is 
seriously too late. In due season, he makes the 
average citizen, neighbor, friend or companion; 
while all along, the goodly promise is that he will 
make neither a fool nor a prodigy. 

Given, then, a good heredity and plenty of the 
kindly providence that is represented by light, air, 
food, exercise and protection in adequate quality and 



NORMAL AND ABNORMAL GROWTH 123 

measure all through the rapidly succeeding days, and 
the child will ultimately be so furnished as to assure 
its continued growth in stature and wisdom after its 
own unique purpose and plan. That is, if as par- 
ents and guides we continue to heed the fact that, 
fundamentally, the life-principle within — the hu- 
man energy — seeks first and emphatically and al- 
ways, not to be led, but rather to assert itself in 
every experiential way possible, and this, no matter 
what the opposition or the consequence may happen 
to be. In the growing child each new presentation 
to the senses, each new activity of the imagination, 
each newly conceived idea, each emotional or other 
feeling, becomes, first, a new reason for his exerting 
himself often in sturdiest opposition, and, second, 
for bringing his muscle or mind or soul into some new 
struggle for conquest and mastery. Nor is this to 
be necessarily counted wrong in any sense. For, 
however troublesome or portentous such a course 
may seem to be, it really constitutes the potentiality 
upon which all the growth and education of the child 
naturally depends. Hence, let parents respect and 
profit by the fact that everywhere normally the child, 
although often not so passive or receptive, or so 
easily led or restrained, or so inspired or deflected, 
as they think desirable, is still always so rightly en- 
gaged, even when acting out of its own impulses or 
rejecting the wisdom of its elders, or even rebelling 
against the best of guidance, that possibly its very 
best interests are being entirely subserved, neverthe- 
less. At any rate, it must be often granted that 
the majority of children seem to be mightily inspired 
from within, not only to prove all things for them- 



1U HIGHER LIVING 

selves, but likewise to hold fast just that which 
seems good to themselves, rather than to their elders. 
Indeed, the basic motive for their living at all would 
seem to be simply, having their own way despite all 
else and regardless of the purposes and plans of 
other people. 

But always in determined opposition to this, how- 
ever, we must still note, as the child grows older, the 
effect of both incidental and prevailing stimuli from 
the world around. Thus, the circus of the day may 
set in action whole groups of muscles that have 
heretofore lain mostly dormant. A full orchard or 
a berry patch ma}' start the fat and other tissue 
cells into activity unheard of as yet. A new book 
may set the head a-humming with schemes and im- 
pulses entirely new to the as yet limited experience. 
A good word may fix the child-man destiny perma- 
nently — and so, also, may a bad one. Old tunes 
are easily superseded by catchy new ones ; ambitions 
that yesterday seemed dominant in the extreme are 
today forgotten because of the awakening of fresh 
ones ; old flames die down and the fresh face scintil- 
lates and glows while the heart is monopolized for 
the nonce, if not so certainly forever. And so it is 
comprehensively. The child's organism ever in re- 
sponse to inner or outside influences sends out an 
extension here, another there; starts upward at a 
bound, or gets to itself girth above all else ; yet never 
all along or altogether, but by piecemeal, as it were, 
and in never ending rivalry, do its especial compo- 
nents continually grow, — finally to get rounded 
well together into an adult form and weight. 
And so, too, with the mind and heart. Today sen- 



NORMAL AND ABNORMAL GROWTH 125 

sation, tomorrow motion ; then ideation, then fancy ; 
finally affection or volition; each and all in turn 
taking the lead and giving the keynote for the time 
being to the whole inner life, and necessarily so, 
probably, on account of the organism's not being 
able at any one time to possess force and supplies 
enough to carry on the whole system of developmen- 
tal processes at once; and so being obliged, as it 
were, to push first one and then another feature 
ahead as best it can. 

In noting this growth carefully in any particular 
direction, it thus appears that in no sense does it 
progress regularly and according to some inflexible 
system, no matter how thoroughly thought out ac- 
cording to fancy or even present knowledge. On 
the contrary, we see that at one time the develop- 
ment of height outruns that of weight ; at others, in- 
tellect, compared say with moral sensibility, is quite 
foremost. Again, the arms grow faster than the 
legs, or the brain lags behind the chest, or the di- 
gestive system may get to be disproportionate to the 
excretory; in fact, the different parts and organs 
and features of the growing child hardly ever keep 
abreast, and always, there is the possibility of some 
one or more of these getting behind the rest and 
never catching up, and so handicapping the being for 
all time. 

Undoubtedly it is to this, the so-called perverted 
or arrested developments at some one or more imma- 
ture periods, that most of the asymmetries and 
irregularities of human nature are to be attributed. 
With extremities undeveloped, with digestive organs 
but poorly developed, with the heart below normal 



126 HIGHER LIVING 

either in size or power, with any part or organ what- 
soever remaining in an infantile, that is, immature 
condition, the individual necessarily must go through 
life crippled to a corresponding degree. And espe- 
cially is this seen in connection with the brain and 
the nervous system. If, for any reason, these have 
not developed beyond the infantile stage, the per- 
son is always bound to remain more or less an in- 
fant or a child, in so far as impulses and ways of 
thinking and doing are concerned, even though the 
body, including the head, may reach normal or even 
gigantic proportions. The world is full of these 
pitiable people, whose brains and nerves have thus 
been developed only to the scattered, reflex, auto- 
matic, and so, very largely, infantile and irre- 
sponsible stage; and this, although they may have 
very good sense-organs, and may also be exception- 
ally able to remember, and in some ways to use all 
sorts of dissociated items of knowledge, as well. 

Again, everyone knows that some people see things 
double, or askew; that others estimate positions 
either too high, or too low, or too wide, or too re- 
mote. When investigated, this is found to be owing 
simply to the fact that the eyes and their associated 
brain structures have never grown to complete full- 
ness or symmetry. Again, on account of interfer- 
ence with the growth of certain cells in the spinal 
cord, someone's leg remains spindling throughout 
the entire life, and with consequent lameness ; in 
other instances, arrest of growth in certain portions 
of the brain results in more or less undersize or dis- 
tortion of the head, with obvious idiocy or imbe- 
cility. In many other instances there is stoppage 



NORMAL AND ABNORMAL GROWTH 127 

of a more refined but of quite as serious an order ; as, 
for instance, when someone is not much of a linguist ; 
someone else can never conquer mathematics, or his 
friend can never get beyond the crudest musical com- 
prehensions ; each, undoubtedly, for the reason that 
the appropriate brain centers and their several asso- 
ciation fibers have stopped growing at some prema- 
ture point, either from disease or accident, or ex- 
haustion or from a serious lack of nutrition or over- 
work. Another otherwise successful person fails in 
money-making ; a good brother is a physical coward, 
or his sister has very little self-control ; someone else 
has weak will-power; still another can never take 
any sort of good initiative, or reveal ability to per- 
ceive necessary moral distinctions ; a certain other 
man invariably takes poetry, or even a joke, liter- 
ally ; his neighbor never succeeds at chess ; and his 
next-door friend cannot manipulate living men as he 
will, or has need to ; and all this, again, and in so 
many instances, also, simply, says science, because 
certain necessary structures and functions have been 
arrested or perverted in the course of their growth 
and organization, at some point below the normal 
average. 

On the other hand, the possibilities of irregular 
growth may show themselves in some form of over- 
development; and, in this respect also, there is no 
part or function of the body that may not be in- 
volved. Hands too big, arms too long, body dis- 
proportioned to either; brains larger than the 
bodies they minister to or control; emotions domi- 
nant where intellect is needed, or the reverse; am- 
bition like Wolsey's and achievement like Micaw- 



128 HIGHER LIVING 

ber's ; — in each particular sphere there being such 
a hypertrophy or other perversion of growth or 
function as may be possible in any one of the differ- 
ent spheres of individual life. In fact, we may 
sum it all up in these words : Arrested and dispropor- 
tionate development is the basis of so much evil and 
suffering, that it has become one of the most import- 
ant of the phases of ethical significance demanding 
investigation and correction that is at present 
known. It certainly is encouraging to note that 
this important matter of arrested and perverted de- 
velopment — in fact, of the exceptional child, — is 
slowly coming to receive the attention it needs; in 
fact there is getting to be no limit to the kindly and 
helpful regard with which he may be considered, and 
with the clearest conscience and fullest justification 
possible. Given a club foot or spinal curvature, a 
faulty heart valve or imperfect eyes and ears, a pal- 
sied hand or obvious exhaustion, or endangering dis- 
ease, and the hand that is not outstretched to pro- 
tect and help such an one is called " brutal," and of 
course justly so. Even where physical defect leads 
thoughtlessly to incessant nick-naming and guying 
on the part of companions, the fact that this is apt 
to be unconsciously appropriated dynamically by 
the unfortunate subject, perhaps forever after to 
stand seriously in the way of the proper develop- 
ment of the native individuality, is now coming to 
be recognized as something that should be guarded 
against. For, such is the force of certain ignomini- 
ous notions on the plastic mind of a child and espe- 
cially if they be frequently and persistently enough 
repeated, that they will be sure to hold and influence 



NORMAL AND ABNORMAL GROWTH 129 

indefinitely and do their destructive work with like 
persistence. Hence the plea is not unreasonable, 
that all who have the care of such physically defec- 
tive children should try in every way possible, either 
to prevent all such detrimental " tagging," or else to 
substitute some other better one, in order to offset its 
evil influence as quickly and as forcibly as possible. 

And for the parent, especially for the mother, how 
natural it is to favor the child that is thus so seri- 
ously afflicted. None other of the whole flock seems 
quite so precious. All the other members may be 
given luxuriant estimates, and upon them may be 
based every hope that is fond and satisfying. But 
this exceptional one — this small cripple, with no 
or little prospect at all — it is he who gets closer 
and closer to the heart, and at last fairly revels in 
a love, peculiar, it is true, and yet never for others 
quite so deep or so lasting. Indeed, no picture in 
the home gallery is quite so revealing as this of 
physical defect enfolded closely in the parental soul. 
It is the hundredth of the flock enveloped in a divine- 
ness, such as only the bells of heaven can appropri- 
ately express. 

Noting all this deference to the needs and claims 
of the physically inefficient makes it in turn quite as 
surprising as it is mysterious that the certain other 
kind of deformity, which is certainly not less fre- 
quent nor less important, should be so often re- 
garded indifferently or in directly an opposite way, 
even by parents themselves. Let it but appear that 
not the physical, but the mental or moral nature is 
defective or perverted, then how our sympathies are 
apt to be repelled and all our extra care charged re- 



130 HIGHER LIVING 

ligiously to its debit account! Given ten ordinarily 
good and intelligent people, and nine of them will 
surely excuse and palliate and try to help the re- 
sults of obvious physical defect, where they nearly 
every one will more or less exhibit uncalled for neg- 
lect, or scorn, or will even condemn or punish most 
cruelly the 'outcome of mental and moral delin- 
quency ; and this, after all the many centuries of edu- 
cational and religious activity devoted assiduously to 
defects supposed to need it most, rather than to those 
that are merely physical. Is it possible that our 
apprehension of human characteristics as such have 
been and still are rather too intellectual or too stupid 
to be just? Have we really become blind to the 
most important affairs of the spirit, and are now 
seeing only, as it were, skin deep? Dr. O. W. 
Holmes put it not untruly when he said : " I feel as 
if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may use 
the expression, with a certain tenderness we need not 
waste on finer natures." Surely, it is the sick and 
defective interiorly, as well as those that are simi- 
larly afflicted exteriorly, who unquestionably most 
need a physician and pedagogue — many times, even 
much the more urgently; and there certainly is no 
longer any excuse for the neglect and misdirection 
that so often result in permanent inefficiency of 
mind and perversion of morals. Here again is 
where a little intelligent observation and truly de- 
voted energizing in time, will do more than any 
amount of correction when too late. Had Ibsen's 
" Mrs. Aveling " spent half as much properly di- 
rected energy in rightly educating her " Oswald " — 
" My only boy ! You are all I have in the world ! 



NORMAL AND ABNORMAL GROWTH 131 

The only thing I care about ! " — as she was duly 
forced to spend uselessly, because of his inherited 
tendency to an undue devotion always to the " joy 
of life," she would not at the end have had so despair- 
ingly to cry, " I can't bear it ; I can't bear it ! 
Never!" 



CHAPTER XII 
FEARING: LYING: STEALING 



Those bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all 
new and strange, and hope has not yet got wings to fly 
beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer 
to summer seems measureless. george eliot 

Many instincts ripen at a certain age and then fade 
away. A consequence of this law is, that if, during the 
time of such an instinct's vivacity, objects adequate to 
arouse it are met with, a habit of acting upon them is 
formed, which remains when the original instinct has 
passed away; but that if no such objects are met with, 
then no habit will be formed. william james 

The presence of wild exaggeration or deliberate fiction 
in children's stories does not necessarily imply dishon- 
esty or love of lying. The child's world is not coldly 
realistic, it is full of make-believe; it has subjective 
needs that demand expression even if objective truthful- 
ness gets somewhat slighted. john fiske 

I one day saw a woman in front of the house buying 
some potatoes. I knew that potatoes cooked were very 
comforting to empt}^ stomachs. One or two of them fell 
to the street during the measuring and I picked one up, 
and, fairly wild with delight, I scrambled up the stairs 
with it. But my mother was angry through and through. 
"Who gave it to you?" she demanded. I explained 
with a trembling voice: " I des' founded it on the very 
ground — and I'se so hungry!" But hungry or not 
hungry, I had to take the potato back. " Nothing in the 
world could be taken without asking — that was steal- 
ing." CLARA MORRIS 



CHAPTER XII 

FEARING: LYING: STEALING 

One of the most important considerations of chil- 
dren is respecting their being the subjects of fear. 
Almost all adults can remember various childhood 
" spells," when they were in agony over certain 
vague or perhaps more definitely fearsome matters 
with which they ought never to have had anything 
to do. Among these were morbid fears of death, of 
bodily harm especially to loved ones, and of them- 
selves being carried away by ogres, or severely pun- 
ished for what they many times knew not. In the 
fears of many children the superstitious element is 
very large, especially if they have been repeatedly 
imposed upon by older persons, or have attended too 
regularly unsuitable services at church or Sunday- 
school. Instead of comprehending the ideas that 
are supposed to be plainly enough taught by their 
would-be instructors, these little misunderstanders 
get but ghostly semblances of the truth, which alto- 
gether more frequently than otherwise plague in- 
stead of help them, perhaps forever after. Vague 
but ominous visions of awful places for bad men 
and naughty children ; the crack and swish of lashes 
over their own backs ; the scorching of fires in which 
parents or relatives forever and forever scream and 

Writhe ; the chill of cold death made worse by dark 

135 



136 HIGHER LIVING 

sepulchres ; as well as all sorts and varieties of simi- 
larly fear-inspiring fancies, all too often make the 
unsuspecting boy and girl walking shadows of their 
own imaginings and the many forebodings associated 
with these. 

But this is not the road to moral health, nor is it 
good mental pabulum, either. No child should ever 
be left to brood over such unwholesome things unsus- 
pected and unhelped. Pity unspeakable is due the 
poor child who has no one to whom he dare go, be- 
cause of anticipated repulsion or of being made 
cruel sport of. The simple fact is, the heart of 
many a child eats itself up in loneliness and morbid 
anticipation, simply because there is no one suitable 
and near at hand for the needed companionship and 
social expression. Consequently someone should see 
to it that no child is left without an intelligent, kind- 
hearted Familiar, into whose ears all such matters 
can be poured indiscriminately, and from whom there 
shall be received in turn a sympathetic, wise and ex- 
planatory consideration. If nothing better, let for- 
lorn children be turned over to the " Sam Slawsons " 
of the neighborhood; such characters have been a 
timely God-send to many a child, who, for all his 
parents or other legitimate protectors would, or even 
could, know or do, might otherwise have gone on 
brooding unto disaster if not destruction. 

Generally speaking, here is choice opportunity, or 
sphere or career, for a universal exercise of energy 
and knowledge, which will pay those who enter upon 
it so many fold that their own selves will perceptibly 
broaden and deepen in consequence. Hawthorne 
pitied the person whose smile did not awaken a re- 



FEARING: LYING: STEALING 137 

turning smile from children. But he said naught of 
the unresponsive child who wonders why anyone 
should ever smile upon him at all. Let the art of 
awakening the smiles of childhood be much more gen- 
erally cultivated than now, especially by certain un- 
employed womankind who might devote themselves to 
this, at least quite as intelligently and assiduously 
as to the making of slippers or pin cushions for cer- 
tain older and more attractive brethren, who yet 
may not smile at all as expected. If they will do this, 
I am sure that sometime, even if long after, many a 
smiling face will light up the procession of sad hu- 
manity, and some of the waste places of earth be 
made glad where now all is gloom. Verily, how long 
must the world yet wait before this unostentatious 
most significant commonplace shall thus become the 
veritable Shekinah of many lives, both low and high ! 
Closely allied to fears, and very generally growing 
out of the natural cowardice that is behind most of 
them, is the almost universal tendency on the part of 
children, sooner or later, to indulge more or less 
regularly in the practice of what older people call 
" lying." And probably there is nothing that is 
oftener a source of great anxiety as well as deep 
sorrow to parents, than this. That their own Little 
Jewel, so fresh from the mint of the Great Artificer, 
should so early prove to be seemingly as spurious as 
this practice is generally thought to indicate, is not 
more beyond their understanding than it is fraught 
with fear of untoward consequences, which, as they 
anticipate them, may prove to be of the utmost seri- 
ousness. Yet how mistaken is this notion of the use- 
lessness or even sinfulness of a child's " lying," and 



138 HIGHER LIVING 

how very useless or worse, all this foreboding. 
What we call " children's lies " are at first no more 
lies in a real sense, and are no more to be burdened 
with the consequences of lying, than are the way- 
ward, inco-ordinated, purposeless motions of early 
infancy either to be considered wrong in themselves 
or necessarily portentous of evil. 

In either case, we have to do simply with an 
epoch in the course of natural development, the out- 
come of which will be useful or useless or harmful 
just to the extent to which the subsequent growth 
is rightly anticipated and eventually made to be. 
Thus, we know there could never have been subse- 
quent handling, or walking, or voicing, to any pur- 
pose whatever, if all the preceding months of mean- 
ingless noises and motions had not been gone through 
with; and we may be just as sure that certain very 
important phases of a similar natural mental ac- 
tivity just as necessarily depend on this antecedent 
period of unbounded fancy, luxurious ideation, way- 
ward speech, and castle-building of every conceiv- 
able nature; upon a period, in fact, during which 
seemingly wrong tendencies alone hold sway. Like- 
wise, just as truly, too, may we be sure, that if the 
first purposeless motions had never been succeeded 
by those which were subordinated to rational pur- 
poses and plans as well as to the lessons of daily ex- 
perience, simple ability to move would have become 
merely a nuisance or a curse, as it really is in many 
an adult; so, too, that if the wayward, seemingly 
foundationless, often purposeless, imaginings or even 
purposeful fact-distortions of the older child, are 
never to be superseded by the proper uses of the 



FEARING: LYING: STEALING 139 

imagination, and by the proper strength to stand 
on the truth itself, there will result but very obvi- 
ous perversions and weaknesses of character, even as 
we now see them so many times. Hence, it is all- 
important to remember that, whatever the outcome 
in either case may be, it is not the motor ability, 
or the " lying " ability, which is to be blamed ; but, 
rather, the way in which either has been trained 
along lines of subordination and use, or otherwise. 

Closely analyzed, the faculty for lying is seen to 
be just as useful in its place as the faculty for tell- 
ing the truth. For, it is either through vivid rep- 
resentations of actual facts in more universal, or 
more restricted relations ; or through imagined new 
situations and new combinations of facts to fill these ; 
or through the projection of self into imaginary re- 
lationships, and a subsequent learning from the con- 
sequences thereof; or through a want of the actual 
knowledge required for understanding the purport 
of certain circumstances of stress or pain, and the 
attempt to invent something which will answer the 
immediate demand for relief; or through fear of 
anticipated consequences and a most natural effort 
to prevent these ; — in fact, through a most legiti- 
mate use of these valuable fundamental activities 
of the faculty of imagination, that the young child 
or the older child either, ever develops the future 
power and possibility of invention, or of construc- 
tive imagination, or of projecting himself inspiringly 
into the future, and the like. This being so, why 
should we condemn that which is evidently so natural 
and so necessary to the child's full growth, even 
though it give us pain, and may be difficult to direct 



140 HIGHER LIVING 

into the more useful channels? Certainly by such 
misunderstood condemnation, we will neither get a 
right notion of what the growing child needs at this 
stage, nor do justice to his as yet unrevealed normal 
nature. To illustrate. A little girl, standing by a 
shrub full of flowers near the sidewalk, was spoken to 
b} 7- the passing patrolman in these simple words : 
" Good morning, little girl." Soon after, to one who 
had seen and heard it all, and who simply remarked, 
"The policeman spoke to you, didn't he?" it was 
answered abruptly, " Yes, ma'am. He said ' Don't 
pick those flowers ' ; and then he ran as fast as he 
could down the street." The mother of the child 
had just been speaking in sorrow of her child's 
growing tendency to lie, and, being present, was 
thoroughly shocked at this new offense in the pres- 
ence of comparative strangers, and of course was 
greatly troubled anew to know what her little one 
was " coming to," and what was the proper course 
to take. Yet, when adequately investigated, what 
did we find? Simply, or rather complexly, this: 
The child lived where the people were very crotchety 
about their few flowers, and had told her frequently 
not to touch them, and had threatened the policeman's 
services, if she did. Again, one day, while walking 
on the street with her mother, they had actually seen 
a policeman running rapidly ahead of them. More- 
over, the child was very fond of flowers of every kind. 
Now then, putting the real facts together — love of 
flowers, emphatic repression of her love in connection 
with the policeman's role, and the actual observation 
of one part of his activity, — there had come most 
naturally along with the policeman's pleasant ac- 



FEARING: LYING: STEALING 141 

costing a fine opportunity for the child's imagina- 
tion to reconstruct things so as to satisfy the bud- 
ding instinct for invention, — but with, of course, the 
moral aspect of the matter quite unthought of — an 
opportunity in fact for a free expression of her 
budding imagination, to which she was as much en- 
titled, and for exactly similar reasons, as she had 
many times before been entitled to freedom of mo- 
tion purely, and with no more consciousness of lying, 
either. 

Remembering this, we ought to be able to see how 
it is that if a child could never go through the stage 
of fanciful depicting called lying, he would in con- 
sequence be just so much the less prepared for the 
valuable scientific and poetical and philosophic uses 
of the imagination, later in life, which might be just 
the one thing most necessary for his best realization 
of his life-career. Certainly without the possession 
of a constructive imagination and power to use it, 
nothing in the whole realm of invention, discovery, 
or propaganda could possibly have been. For in 
everyone of these realms, it is upon the power to con- 
ceive some new construction of facts or ideas, and to 
hold such a new hypothetical construction in mind 
until experience proves it to be either useless or 
wrong, that everything really depends which is either 
useful or beautiful or good. And the growing child- 
mind is not to be blamed for a timely exercise of a 
faculty, which, later on, may mean simply and en- 
tirely more freedom to conceive new light and to seek 
it and to profit by it in every acceptable way. 

So, then, instead of whipping and condemning and 
damning children for " lying," let us seek to learn the 



142 HIGHER LIVING 

true significance of this natural activity and the laws 
which govern it; and then ever to try to direct it in 
such a way that, instead of permanent defect or 
perversion, the proper uses of the imagination and 
the proper development of intellectual and moral 
strength will surely follow. 

Even moral strength itself does not come as such 
except in the face of circumstances, which, seemingly, 
can best be met at the time by lying. Hence, moral 
instruction as such should all have reference to show- 
ing how such fanciful evasions of facts and their 
consequences appear and ought to be estimated, 
alongside of a courageous looking at things squarely 
in the face, and grappling with them according to 
their real worth instead of according to fanciful 
standards that are only fictitious. To this end, let 
the base idea of evil that is now attached to children's 
lies be superseded by one of a goodly goal to which 
these may be made to lead. Especially should the 
acutely imaginative child always be treated in such 
a way as to emphasize the fact of untruth as little 
as possible. This can be best done in most cases by 
invariably placing the truth itself conspicuously 
alongside the untruth; by clearly pointing out the 
difference between these ; and by repeating this until 
the little mind is adequately impressed, and is shown 
beyond speculation the consequences which must nec- 
essarily follow either, in turn ; and this, not so much 
by dwelling on the awfulness of lying as by pointing 
out the courage and strength and happiness that re- 
sults from trying always to see things as they really 
are and by saying only what should be said and doing 
the right things always, as well. This, enforced by 



FEARING: LYING: STEALING 143 

being ourselves perfectly accurate in all our own 
observations and descriptions and adventures will, 
we may be sure, lead ultimately to such a praise- 
worthy reconstruction of the tendencies of the child's 
imagination as will result in its entire good, even- 
tually. In this connection many would-be correctors 
of children have first need to get the beam of super- 
lativity out of their own eyes before they can cor- 
rectly try to deal with the mote of lying, supposed 
to be seen in those of their children. Moreover, there 
is nowhere more vividly illustrated the fact that, not 
what correctors inculcate abstractly, but what they 
live concretely, is just what most deeply and perma- 
nently influences children, either for good or for evil. 
Likewise at some point in almost every child's de- 
velopment, and again most frequently growing out 
from the root of morbid fear, there is manifest an 
equally disturbing impulse to steal. Even when sup- 
plied with everything desirable as well as needful, the 
instinct to acquisition will more or less blind the child 
to the conventional boundary lines betwixt " mine " 
and " thine," and seek gratification in its own natural 
way. This should be regarded, again, not as evi- 
dence of " original sin," or necessarily of " bad in- 
heritance," but simpty as a phase of normal develop- 
ment, — a necessary phase, in fact, wherein the per- 
sonality first gets itself differentiated, both as to it- 
self and to its rightful belongings. Properly man- 
aged, this most desirable instinct is, as a rule, easily 
corrected, and the child continues to develop with no 
or very little scarring of the sensibility, and without 
forming a habit that will endanger its subsequent 
career. 



1U HIGHER LIVING 

If not thus easily overcome, however, or if allowed 
to grow without correction, pilfering rapidly becomes 
a permanent habit, which may dominate the entire 
subsequent life, if not in gross vulgar criminal ways, 
then in sly and more " respectable " but even more 
reprehensible ones ! As a rule, when otherwise nor- 
mal children show a permanent disposition to pilfer- 
ing, it may be assumed that probably from the first 
they have been wrongly dealt with, and that not they 
themselves but their parents and instructors have 
been to blame. The fact is, habitual deception of 
any kind in children is a matter of growth, — possi- 
bly of too well-sown seed, — probably in a soil first 
fitted for it, and then unduly cultivated, by those 
who are most often unconscious of what they have 
done. This being so, it is necessary that when dis- 
covered there should be undertaken at once the 
strictest overhauling of all the environmental per- 
sonalities from the heads of the household down, in 
order to discover just where the real source of diffi- 
culty lies, and how it may be remedied. This effected, 
let the matter never afterwards be referred to ; but, 
instead, let the spirit and habit of uttermost trust- 
worthiness be sedulously cultivated and by the only 
true method, namely, that of actually trusting the 
erring one to every extent possible ; by then care- 
fully watching that he falls not again ; and finally by 
unceasingly cultivating a personal integrity and 
companionship which shall inspire to better things, 
unmistakably and effectually. Yes, it is again and 
ever to be enforced that during the outcropping of 
the child's instincts, he always needs the companion- 
ship of proper people, conceived and carried out in 



FEARING: LYING: STEALING 145 

a truly companionable way; and especially in the 
cases where the tendency to form bad habits of any 
kind shows itself to be at all stubborn. Generally 
speaking, such absolute trust, such careful watch- 
ing, such unremitting companionship, especially if 
favored by due intelligence, is overworth all the so- 
called " corrections " and " disciplines," so conven- 
tionally conceived and practiced, and. yet so often 
bound to defeat their own purpose. 

But how can there be such beneficial companion- 
ship for children in the hours of their dire need, if 
all the while older people permit themselves to be 
dominated by impulses and habituated to practices 
which certainly imply false prepossessions, if they 
do not prove it? We are very quick to note and 
disparage downright stealing, it is true, both in chil- 
dren and in those who have never outgrown this 
childish practice ; but how very slow are we, never- 
theless, to discern the varied pilferings of our own 
hearts and hands, manifest in so many daily conven- 
tions and practices, and under guises that neither 
fully explain nor adequately justify. 

Thus, when we so usually try to get something for 
nothing, or for which we render no appropriate 
equivalent ; or try to make people think better of us 
than we really are ; or pretend to believe what we 
only perfunctorily hear; or to deceive not only the 
elect but our very own selves in a thousand ways, 
and thus try to enhance our selfhood unjustifiably 
or reveal it falsely; we are all thus, are we not? 
rather more apt to judge of the bearing of this with 
respect to our own convenience and comfort, than 
with respect to what it may prove to be in the lives 



146 HIGHER LIVING 

of our children or our neighbors ! Yet, assume as 
Ave may that life goes on easier and smoother and 
more successfully because of certain not quite true 
speeches and appearances and practices which do 
not rightfully belong to us, it follows, nevertheless, 
that if we are to make our children upright, honest 
and self-reliant, we would better first mend both our 
thoughts and our ways in this respect, and then sup- 
port this very high endeavor by a rather pronounced 
change of heart, from the moment of discovery and 
decision, ever onward. The fact is, the constant de- 
manding of more than we give, the constant appear- 
ing to be more than we are, the constant attempting 
to do more than we are fitted for, is bound eventu- 
ally to determine within our own natures certain 
grooves of unfitness which, in turn, often predeter- 
mine the direction or pace that the child nature com- 
mitted to our care will ultimately take. A child can- 
not live in the presence of greedy, unscrupulous, 
selfish adult life without being seriously impressed 
for ill, in consequence. Hence, if we think it worth 
while to cultivate honest independence in children, we 
should first cultivate a personal belief in the worth of 
this, as compared with the domestic and social ser- 
vility of the common order. Practically, often the 
revelation of our own real selves truly comes first 
when we have to be responsible for unformed natures. 
Practically, also, it is often when we first undertake 
to cultivate others that we get our first good lesson 
in the needed cultivation of ourselves. Especially 
does seeing ourselves thus in the mirror of childhood 
naturally prompt the desire to improve the reality 
of what we see in ourselves. Hence it follows, that 



FEARING: LYING: STEALING 147 

only together do the parent and child best learn 
and practice the one very important dictum of 
Higher Living, in fact the very most important, 
namely, that we shall not only not take what does 
not belong to us, but that we shall always try to give 
in some form or other an equivalent or more than this, 
for everything that comes to us. For thus only 
shall both our legacy and our acquisitions alike en- 
rich us, and enable us rightly to possess and use them 
to the very best advantage. 



CHAPTER XIII 
HARMONY: RELIGION 



Let the child's religion be capable of expansion and as 
little systematic as possible ; let it lie upon the heart like 
the light, loose soil, which can be broken through as the 
heart bursts into fuller life. If it be trodden down hard 
and stiff in formularies it is more than probable that the 
whole must be burst thro' and broken violently and 
thrown off altogether when the soul requires room to 
germinate. f. w. Robertson 

Those who tell me too much about God; who speak as 
if they knew his motive and his plan in everything; who 
are never at a loss to name the reason of every structure 
and show the tender mercy of every event; who praise 
the cleverness of the eternal economy, and patronize it 
as a master-piece of forensic ingenuity; who carry them- 
selves through the solemn glades of Providence with the 
springing steps and jaunty air of a familiar; do but 
drive me by the very definiteness of their assurance into 
an indefinite agony of doubt. james martineau 

By music Socrates meant not simply that combination 
of sounds that catches up a few fragments of this world's 
harmonies, and with them moves our souls. There is 
another and a higher music. It is the music of the soul 
in which dwell order and method; which co-ordinates all 
knowledge; which recognizes the ideal; in which the 
good, the true, and the beautiful are cultivated, each ac- 
cording to its own nature, and by its own method. It 
is the rhythm of a thoroughly disciplined intellect and 
a well-regulated life. brother azarius 



CHAPTER XIII 

HARMONY: RELIGION 

Almost every one who has thought about the possi- 
bility of Higher Living, has recognized the universal 
need of harmony, both in the individual and the col- 
lective life. Warring elements within, so distressing 
and often not very useful so far as can be recognized, 
seem often beyond controL Probably only a few 
ever reach the condition of spirit and body in which 
these work together in unison and give continuous 
satisfaction. Nor are there many communities in 
which the individual members feel very fully in har- 
mony with one another. Always the discord, the 
strife, the jealousy, the inequality, the sense of ill- 
being, so pervades and dominates, that only for the 
unambitious or the surfeited does anything like stable 
peace seem possible. Moreover, harmony — sweet, 
restful, life-conserving harmony — seems utterly be- 
yond realization. Sometimes the foundations for 
disharmony are congenital. But quite as frequently 
disharmony is the result of the influence of a dis- 
cordant environment during infant and early child- 
hood days. Parents who do not harmonize with 
each other; attendants and helpers who are in fre- 
quently recurring jangles; other children who repre- 
sent several disparate lines of ancestry and conse- 
quently jar and rasp one another almost without 
ceasing; governesses, kindergartners and teachers 

151 



152 HIGHER LIVING 

who have little or no unity of life of their own, and 
consequently foster and cultivate discordant tenden- 
cies in their charges ; even the neighborhood and 
school and church disaffections ; — all these con- 
tribute toward making an environment that either 
interferes with the child's symmetry of growth, or 
else, slowly toward bringing about ultimate disinte- 
gration and conflict, and this so permanently, that 
nothing short of a thoroughgoing revolution can 
bring about changes for the better. 

Undoubtedly, so to direct parental and other en- 
vironmental life to harmonious ends as to prevent 
the development of disharmony in progeny, seems to 
many quite impracticable ; and, as a matter of fact, 
in many instances it is so difficult that only a par- 
tial success is probable. But even when this is so, 
it is worth while from the point of view of both the 
family and community most seriously to undertake it 
and persevere unto the better end. Every child is 
certainly entitled to as harmonious a nature as may 
be possible; and even if this can be secured in part 
only, then let this be as seriously worked for as if 
entire ultimate success were to be attained. 

Evidently the success of one family in securing and 
maintaining both individual and collective harmony 
can seldom be taken for the standard to which all 
others should endeavor to attain. So much depends 
upon conditions peculiar to any given household or 
to its familiar associates, and to chance matters en- 
tirely unpredictable, that only by a careful study of 
existing circumstances, and often by a careful ex- 
perimentation, as well, can the right standard or 
method be discovered. Indeed here, as everywhere 



HARMONY: RELIGION 153 

else, as soon as one finds a motive for bettering 
things, nothing less than a most intelligent direction 
of every attempt at accomplishing it is essential, if 
the best results are to be secured. What, for in- 
stance, will unify, harmonize, restrain and constrain 
one child, may be painfully inapplicable to another. 
What again one parent can do, may be quite impos- 
sible for the other to undertake. It often appears 
that separate endeavor is the wiser course, provid- 
ing, always, that equal power of control be main- 
tained throughout ; for quite opposed to harmony is 
the method which leaves the sterner, exacter part of 
discipline to one parent alone. 

One of the most important factors in the harmon- 
izing of the human personality, is persistent training 
to recognize the importance of a few exact and defi- 
nite rules of life, and to obey these explicitly; and 
the earlier this can begin to be secured, the better. 
Thus regularity of bodily habits, such as of sleep, 
food, play, excretion, etc., should be developed from 
the earliest day ; then, as soon as the babe develops 
sufficiently to begin to react at all to a very few 
definite intellectual and moral restraints and con- 
straints, let these be firmly but gently made. This 
need not, does not, interfere with the spontaneous de- 
velopment of its faculties ; on the contrary, it favors 
this in the most useful way. What is needed for 
everybody is, that even thus early in life, he shall 
have learned the inviolability of his own constitution, 
the relative importance of the socius, and the in- 
flexible laws governing the whole universe, and this 
so thoroughly that the spirit of right willing, and 
consequently of harmonious obedience, shall eventu- 



154 HIGHER LIVING 

ally be forever his, to enjoy and otherwise to profit 
by. No mistake can be made in early training, even 
of infancy, that is more lastingly harmful than that 
of not teaching and practicing the benefit, safety and 
prosperity that accrue from simple obedience, not to 
arbitrary command so much as to a right apprecia- 
tion of the inflexible constitution of all things. To 
the infant mind, the parent should stand as the most 
material embodiment of this, and should be firmly but 
gently influenced accordingly. To the adult mind, 
it is the law itself that should be accepted as authori- 
tative and to be obeyed. 

Next to simple obedience, is the lesson of retribu- 
tive distress from disobedience, or infraction of law. 
No one should command another, young or old, who' 
does not see clearly enough the real need of this les- 
son, and has not the requisite force both to justify 
and to execute it. To the young child, let the les- 
sons of clear prevision, inflexible determination, and 
firm exaction, come early and persistently. How- 
ever, this does not require constant interference or 
direction ; it simply means that whenever anything is 
required of the child, it shall be reasonable, possible 
of natural response, and unflinchingly exacted. 
Even no more than one such lesson a day will, in 
time, secure the desired result, providing everything 
else does not conspire to undo progress as fast as it 
is secured. Evenness of demand and exactitude is 
what tells in the long run. And the sooner com- 
mand gives way to gentlest request, which, however, 
admits of none the less prompt compliance, the bet- 
ter. Life comes to us both as constraint and invi- 
tation. Happy those who learn to heed the invita- 



HARMONY: RELIGION 155 

tion, and to require not the imposition of constraint. 

With obedience based upon intelligible as well as 
emotional reasons and inflexibly exacted, the nerv- 
ous system grows so as to conform automatically, 
and in the end, easily and happily to every just de- 
mand. With this secured, the way is opened for 
realizing every good thing that conscientious older 
individuals deem needful. On this, as a basis, all the 
spontaneity of nature may be allowed fullest pla}^. 
For, thus safeguarded, there is little danger of go- 
ing so far in any evil direction as to get beyond the 
reach or efficacy of restraining or corrective influ- 
ences. This appears first in the freedom of the 
child's play. Here the child very early endeavors 
to dramatize everything and everybody at hand. In 
doing this its impulses often incline to extremes of 
every kind. But differences in management and ulti- 
mate effect are soon noticeable, according to whether 
there has or has not been the fundamental training 
of obedience to a higher law or will. If there has 
been this good training, then may outbursts of anger, 
hysterical fits of tears or laughter, ugly moods and all 
the rest that belong naturally to young life, be, as a 
rule, speedily quelled, and without arousing antagon- 
ism, or laying the foundation for antipathies that are 
hard to allay. It is the emergency that reveals char- 
acter, whether in young or old. In the younger 
days, life is apt to be pretty much a succession of 
minor emergencies, which, however, often prove to 
be major in their ultimate consequences. 

Positive, also, is the influence of purely musical 
harmony upon the human spirit. To this end, the 
early lullabies should be simple in form and rendering 



156 HIGHER LIVING 

and pure in matter. Once upon a time, I heard a 
mother try to calm her fretting baby by wildly rock- 
ing 1 back and forth, and loudly screaming the 
"Mountain Song" from "II Trovatore." All it 
needed was another voice or two of the kind to make 
a pandemonium sufficient to split older ears than 
her babe's. This mother had a good voice, but no 
sense to use it with. Music, at once so divine and 
human, seems of itself eminently fitted to harmonize 
and unify. Certain sweet tones heard in babyhood 
will sound softly through the consciousness of a life- 
time. Just why the musical education of the pres- 
ent should not include at least a little attention to 
producing vital results, as well as conventional ones, 
is not apparent. Why, also, woman's musical edu- 
cation should so often prove to be for little or naught 
so soon as she becomes a mother, is another mystery. 
For now, if ever, can she win applaudits which shall 
echo and re-echo to her soul throughout eternity ! 

Another series of positive steps toward harmony 
are proper conversation, reading, and story-telling. 
It was said of Lear's Cordelia, that 

" Her voice was ever soft, 
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman " ; 

and it would be worth infinite pains for every mother 
to secure for herself just such a "gentle and low" 
voice to use in the presence of her children. Con- 
versation can be Eolian; reading aloud can be ex- 
ercised upon all the musical scales ; reciting a poem 
or " singing a story " can awaken responsively har- 
monizing chords in every child. Surely the glad sat- 
isfaction thus secured cannot help reacting upon her 



HARMONY: RELIGION 157 

who gives it ; and when she forthwith looks within her 
own selfhood, or out upon the world, every feature 
will clap its merry hands for her, because she hath 
already the joy to make it so. 

Positive, very positive, as many know, is the benef- 
icent influence also of the right kind of religious cul- 
ture in harmonizing the human spirit at every step 
of its earthly experience. Not, however, as we see 
religion manifest in the rigid creeds and institutions 
of older persons, should we seek to secure its mani- 
festation to younger ones ; but as a feeling of true 
reverence and love for the better moods and striv- 
ings of the elders themselves, who, to the child's com- 
prehension, are very much the same as God himself 
appears to that of older people. " Father " ought 
thus to be made to stand for the strength, right 
activity and ultimate accomplishment, which, if tem- 
pered with kindness, yet admits of no perplexing 
question. " Mother " ought thus to stand for the 
loving constancy, exactitude of detail, and unbounded 
sympathy, w T hich, if tempered with a forceful firm- 
ness, gently yet unmistakably constrains to right- 
eousness. Both together ought to constitute to the 
younger child's mind the veritable embodiment of 
God ; that is, of the principle which underlies feeling 
right, knowing right so far as possible, and doing 
right so far as the little one can see. Better this, 
I am sure, than the exaggerated sense of awe, not 
to say awfulness, which so many children get un- 
necessarily, to their lasting distress and hindrance. 

One day a mother took her young family and a 
guest on a picnic. Just as they were about to eat 
the " goodies " spread temptingly in the sweet shade, 



158 HIGHER LIVING 

her three-year-old boy commanded, " Stop ! " and 
then, dropping his head, continued, in a tone as 
heavy as it was sepulchral : " G-r-e-a-t God ! " 
" S-a-c-r-e-d God ! " after which he looked up smil- 
ingly, and said, " Let's hurry and eat." There was 
no mistaking the mimicry of some clergyman he had 
heard, nor the ponderous notion that he had gotten 
of " God." The effect was certainly not less star- 
tling than ludicrously suggestive of antecedent im- 
pressions, unwittingly made by perhaps very good 
people. 

In order that children may eventually become 
thoroughly educated in all the goodly ways of rever- 
ence and obedience, and thus get rightly started in the 
very essentials of Higher Living, there is need that 
they shall be firmly led early to establish such asso- 
ciations of truly religious feeling with conduct as will 
constitute the better foundation for future develop- 
ment. To this end, they should be encouraged to see 
the handiwork of God in every natural thing and 
process — in their pets, their flowers, in the wind and 
sunshine and all the things they handle ; and, like- 
wise, to reflect upon how wonderful and how complete 
it all is, even when something appears that seems to 
show imperfection or evil; for, the wonderful perfec- 
tion of things as they really are, without the over- 
shadowing consciousness of evil, cannot be too early, 
or too intelligently, or too faithfully, inculcated. 
They should also be taught always to think of the 
wisdom and beneficence and kindness and power of 
God as positive facts ; yet instructors should be very 
careful about teaching also that God can do every- 
thing, or is angry, or is in any way " special " in his 



HARMONY: RELIGION 159 

providence. Such teaching, later on, but makes the 
child sorely perplexed and often logically distrust- 
ful of a God who can, but will not, do what to ma- 
turer reason seems best. If we cannot always satis- 
factorily explain disorder and accident and disease 
and pain, we certainly can say that if we knew 
enough we probably could, and that we must none 
the less be always as intelligent and good and dutiful 
as we can, in order that forms of evil may be lessened 
or removed, and the world be correspondingly bene- 
fited. Moreover, there should be wise persistence in 
attempting to teach the elevating idea, that God is 
a Father who loves us all the time even though he 
cannot prevent our suffering ; but, in order to be un- 
derstood by the child-mind, this will have to be made 
to appear simply as an extension of the more con- 
crete idea, that earthly parents love their children 
always, even though they cannot always keep them 
from being hurt, or sick, or naughty, or have some- 
times to correct them. Certainly it were the better 
practice usually to keep far away from the common 
talk about the " attributes of God," " freedom of 
will," and " original sin," and all the rest of the use- 
less and perplexing technology. Worth more than 
it all can ever be, for young or old, is the daily or 
even more frequent repetition of a few of the grand, 
sweet, truly spiritualizing sentences and stanzas 
which may be easily selected from the Psalms, the 
words of Jesus, and the higher literatures of all ages. 
These, if deeply engrafted upon the growing sensi- 
bilities, and especially if vitally associated with the 
quiet hour of personal communion and confidence 
that every parent should encourage, will not fail to 



160 HIGHER LIVING 

be an everlasting influence in the shaping of the in- 
dividual character; while, later in life, when away 
from parental direction, the spirit, because of such 
early and appropriate training, will naturally tend 
to seek the higher communion and confidence and 
help, not only in the hour of dire need, but in that of 
simplest gratitude and aspiration. 

Undoubtedly, the dangerous moments in the re- 
ligious training of children come when they ask the 
many natural questions that no one can very defi- 
nitely answer, such as " Where does God live? " 
" What makes you pray to nothing? " " Who will 
read the service for the last man ? " " If Jesus lives 
now, where is he ? " " How do they get up to 
heaven?" "What part of heaven do babies come 
from? " " Who made all the world? " " Do they 
have pancakes in heaven?" Who, later in life has 
not been troubled deeply over the recollection that, 
to his own questions so serious and important at 
the time, there were never, either by conversation, 
by church, or by the Bible itself, even so much as sug- 
gested, answers that were sufficiently comprehensive 
and lucid to inform and convince? Evidently, the 
usual stock answers either convey no meaning at 
all to the young mind, or else they bring up an 
imagery as remote from the parental conception of 
the truth as possible. A little girl came home from 
church one Sunday with the question, " How do they 
get blood into a mule's veins?" — suggested by the 
conventional singing of the familiar hymn, 

" There is a fountain filled with blood 
Drawn from Emanuel's veins." 



HARMONY: RELIGION 161 

Another begged her mother to give the beloved 
rector that " two cents " for which he had so often 
prayed — her interpretation of " give us a due sense 
of all thy mercies." Matthew Arnold's little Dicky, 
talking about Prince Albert's death, was overheard 
telling his sister Lucy that he was " gone to Heaven." 
Upon which Lucy asked, " Should I like Heaven, 
Richard, dear? " " Oh, yes, darling," says Dicky, 
" so much ! there's tookey there, and toy-shops, and 
such beautiful dollies ! " And so it is everywhere, 
save when little ones, parrot-like, use set phrases in- 
stead of their own word-concepts. Indeed, it is as 
impossible for the ordinary child to get anything but 
the vaguest sort of ideas through abstract words, 
as it is for him to carry a man's load on his shoul- 
ders ; and for the very same reason — his ideational 
as well as physical capacities are as yet not well 
enough developed to admit of it. A little boy, a son 
of Protestant parents, was seen coming out of a 
Roman Catholic church. When asked by a passerby, 
" What are you doing here; this isn't your church? " 
replied promptly, " I've been in to see God. They 
don't have any over to our church." Nor does the 
precocious exception prove contrariwise. For, as a 
rule, even here it is all concrete and crassly anthro- 
pomorphic, and sometimes not of so wholesome an 
order as might be supposed. Religious priggishness 
seems to be no more desirable than natural indiffer- 
ence. In fact, it may even more seriously interfere 
with timely development of true religion in the grow- 
ing soul, than anything else short of imbecility. 

Not by words, or definitions, or arguments, or con- 
ventional formulas, then, is the spirit of the child 



162 HIGHER LIVING 

adequately to be helped on its eternal way. Happy, 
indeed, if it does not get absolutely blocked by some 
of the ponderous abstractions that older people so 
inappropriately, if ever so sincerely and earnestly, 
cast before it. On the contrary, at every turn, every 
step, in every hour, does the child become powerfully 
re-endowed and shaped and advanced by that which 
was long before speech, which is the very soul of 
speech, which makes every mode of expression truly 
significant, namely, Life. Do parents feel themselves 
ignorant in the face of word-questions suggested 
chiefly by efforts to mimic older ones who so glibly 
use these terms ? Are they appalled at the dark and 
devious caves into which even infantile curiosity seeks 
to lead them? Are they doubtful of ever being able 
to guide the persistent inquirer into the paths of such 
righteousness as they deem important? Are they 
themselves overawed at the mystery that will not be 
revealed, even in the hour of their own utmost self- 
abnegation and absolute trust? Then, let them fall 
back upon the unfailing potency of their own Higher 
Living, in the sustaining consciousness that, simply 
by this, they will be the unfailing exponents of every- 
thing really worth while, whether explicable or not; 
and that, by this, they will surely and always impress 
the young nature appropriately, and so fulfill all 
righteousness, both to themselves and to it. As a 
rule, even the best people have early been taught to 
demand something specific, which they can magically 
use to bring about more satisfactory results, later 
on. But Life itself is thoroughly self-communicable, 
aside from specific rules and words. Through it, 
everything becomes a token — the meanest service, 



HARMONY: RELIGION 163 

the greatest mistake, as well as apparent success, 
and fullness of reward. Everyone of us is suffused 
with the light which he cannot help reflecting to all in 
turn. Upon life — upon life — ever fuller, freer, 
more idealized, unceasingly realized Life — let the 
anxious parent ever rest, as the source of his best 
influence, even when knowledge fails and perplexity 
waxes. The one who can feel in the many after days 
that his or her own confidence was thus founded, need 
not fear of misdoing the Will, or ultimately of not 
knowing the true doctrine. " Perfect love casteth 
out fear," should be written over the portal of every 
home. 

Yes, instead of grieving over our incompetencies, 
let there ever be sustaining faith in the abundance 
and potency of our own growing life. When the little 
one asks questions that we cannot answer, let us be 
honest and say so, and not juggle with the child- 
mind by using terms that it can in nowise understand. 
Nor need frank acknowledgment of our ignorance be 
all. We can always add, " But, if we do as we ought, 
and study hard, and try to feel right toward every- 
body, perhaps we shall know sometime " ; and follow- 
ing this, we can try to set the goodly example with 
all diligence and perseverance. The parent who 
seeks to be a growing personality, a reverent seeker 
of truth, and a devoted doer of it, is the best answer 
the child can ever have to any question. And every 
day, this growing and seeking and doing can be kept 
up through good report and evil, through success and 
failure, through joy and sorrow, when alone, or with 
others ; every day, everywhere, there can be some 
broader additions to knowledge, some deeper insight 



16-t HIGHER LIVING 

into basal facts, some higher hope, some completer 
self-realization. Always this for certain, if only we 
keep our vision of the uses of it, and feel that uses 
and not joys are the main object of all our life. The 
parent who can thus idealize the commonplaces of 
daily life, is sure to inspire the awakening child-spirit 
in directions Christ-like and immortal. 



CHAPTER XIV 
ACCIDENT: DISEASE: DEATH 



All our possessions begin to tremble, when one very- 
dear is taken. The loss of one child makes prominent 
the frailty of all. The bloom of health fades as we look 
upon it. Oh, how desolate we may be made in a mo- 
ment! and how wretched would be our condition if the 
Power which disposes of us were not benevolent! 

WM. E. CHANNING 

O little souls ! as pure and white 
And crystalline as rays of light 

Direct from heaven, their source divine. 

H. W. LONGFELLOW 

It was very sad to lose your child just when he was 
beginning to bind himself to you, and I don't know that 
it is much consolation to reflect that the longer he had 
wound himself up in your heartstrings, the worse the 
tear would have been. huxlev to his daughter 

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a 
baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. 

GEORGE ELIOT 

Only to trust, and do our best, and wear as smiling a 
face as may be for others and ourselves. 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

The ink of science is more precious than the blood of 
martyrs. Arabic 

Children are God's apostles, day by day 

Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace. 

J. R. LOWELL 



CHAPTER XIV 

ACCIDENT: DISEASE: DEATH 

When accident endangers or disease invades the 
home, especially the nursery, then comes the supreme 
test of all that has gone before in the way of endow- 
ment and of training. If both parents and children 
have had these properly and in reasonable measure, 
then is there maximum hope of safety and recovery. 
If otherwise on the part of either, then is the situa- 
tion correspondingly grave. Often the seriousness 
is intensified even unto death, simply because of the 
lack of parental self-control or intelligence. No 
physician or nurse can prevent or remedy the blight- 
ing influence of this ; for no matter how skilful and 
devoted the professional attendance may be, every 
little sufferer needs the sustaining communion and 
comfort of the parental voice and heart and hand. 
Technical skill cannot very frequently be a substitute 
for this, try as it may. On the other hand, when 
skill is interfered with by obtrusive, selfish, ignorant 
parents, no matter how " affectionate " or " sacrific- 
ing," there is no question about the harm that is 
done. Sick or hurt children need parents, not im- 
pulsive, senseless self-indulgers, acting under the guise 
of " devotion." Moreover, they need that the hour 
of suffering shall have been somewhat prepared for, 
especially by the sensible teaching that physicians 
and nurses mean only good as well as parents, and 

167 



168 HIGHER LIVING 

that medicines are all for some good purpose and 
use and made to be as pleasant as may be possible. 
Any family in which by silly or bungling conversa- 
tion physicians and nurses have been carelessly con- 
verted into ogres, or by impulsive efforts at disci- 
pline into abductors and executioners, need not ex- 
pect its little ones, even when mortal diseases or 
broken bones are at hand, to behave rationally. 
Certainly no one should be accepted as family physi- 
cian or nurse, who cannot be accepted as an inti- 
mately trusted friend as well, and represented to 
children as such, invariably. Indeed the children of 
every family should be taught to look upon these as 
visitors but little less than angels, in full embodi- 
ment and service — as being, in fact, among their 
very best friends. 

Quite opposed to this instruction, however, is an- 
other, which in many households needs just as care- 
ful consideration as this ; namely, the need of timely 
preventing the growth of the almost absolute de- 
pendence on physicians and nurses that is seen so 
frequently. While young parents are trying prop- 
erly to understand and care for their first baby, it 
is quite necessary that they do not rashly take 
chances, and that they seek skilled advice and care, 
even upon the first appearance of very slight symp- 
toms. But it is a suggestive comment on the blind 
misusing of opportunity that, during subsequent ex- 
perience, parents so often still find themselves none 
the less self-distrustful and incapable. A single 
close observation of the origin and course of the 
ordinary children's diseases ought to furnish parents 
sufficient light for promptly distinguishing between 



ACCIDENT: DISEASE: DEATH 169 

their early manifestations and something less seri- 
ous ; while in almost every instance, close observation 
for twenty-four hours will enable them to decide 
sensibly and rationally whether a physician should be 
called, or not. A sad frittering of personal re- 
sponsibility is it, when, upon every little deviation 
from the healthy standard, the child's consciousness 
has to be shocked or demoralized by the coming of 
a physician, even until it gets notions of thorough 
disrespect for him, or else, gets a seriously exagger- 
ated fear of disease, and consequently of dependence 
upon him. Altogether too much of the sickness of 
today is based upon the fear which has thus been 
engendered and cultivated early in life. Of all 
things, avoid converting health-consciousness into 
disease-consciousness any earlier or any faster than 
circumstances actually compel. Children have a 
right to be saved from this — a right which should 
be respected both for their own sakes and their 
parents'. 

When the doctor has really come and gone, let the 
disease-side of the child's life drop out of conversa- 
tion and even of care as quickly and as thoroughly as 
may be warranted by events. A mistake that people 
everywhere make, is, that children are not impressed 
when they do not take notice and respond. Yet this 
is not so, especially when sick ; for children then are 
often much more impressionable than when well. 
Hence, crude remarks about their condition often 
sow seed-thoughts that become heavy thought-bur- 
dens later on. Likewise overmuch care and " fuss- 
ing " about their diseases are apt to leave similar 
notional impressions. In all cases, let the talk, the 



170 HIGHER LIVING 

room, the actions, be as nearly normal as possible. 
True sympathy need not name or talk about dis- 
ease; true care need not exaggerate or even mention 
conditions ; true forethought need not make possible 
outcomes vivid. Father's ordinary voice and action 
and mother's usual tenderness and ministries are 
remedial, where strained emotional expressions and 
efforts are destructive. No matter what happens, it 
should always be remembered that it is the pros- 
perity of the sick child that is at stake, and not the 
feelings or theories of parents, or anyone else. 

Nor should parents fail so to anticipate and pre- 
pare for the dread responsibility of the sickroom, as 
not to be able to take it rightfully when the hour of 
stress actually comes. How frequently do mothers*, 
even nursing mothers, during the sickness of one of 
their children unreasonably deny themselves the rest 
and food and mental relief, which are so absolutely 
essential for both their own and their children's 
good. Some feel that their mother-love compels 
them to do this ; others labor under the idea that it 
is undutiful to leave the sick one to anyone else, 
even for an hour. But this is wrong. Parents have 
need to keep strong and well, not only for the sick 
child, but for all the other children of the home, both 
born and unborn. Duty requires recollection of 
these, as well as devotion to the case in hand. Sel- 
dom, indeed, should it be that the mother allows her- 
self to remain by her loved one longer than a couple 
of hours at a time; and this should always alternate 
with rest, food, and attention to other things, so as 
to assure beyond peradventure proper relief from the 
pervading mental stress, which is apt to be so severe 



ACCIDENT: DISEASE: DEATH 171 

and so prolonged. This is necessary in order that 
when crises or other emergencies come, she shall have 
due control of herself, as well as all her mother-wit 
at hand. Remember, besides, that it is the indefi- 
nable but truly potent atmosphere of the sickroom 
which often determines the ultimate result. 

Supposing the prognosis, instead of having been 
hopeful and sustaining, has been grave and the symp- 
toms have become alarming, and the suffering in- 
tense beyond imagination. Now, if ever, do parents 
reveal the fundamental characteristics of their lives* 
as well as their ability to make personal history as 
never at any other time. If they are parents in- 
deed ; if they are persons reliable in body and mind ; 
if they have had comprehensive and accurate culture ; 
— then do they grasp the situation in detail, nerve 
themselves for the awful strain, and often bring vic- 
tory out of impending defeat. If not thus con- 
stituted and prepared, then do they on the contrary 
often have all their future marred by recollections of 
inability and loss that humiliate and pain them un- 
speakably. Surely, then, let this crucial moment, so 
anguish-charged and yet so responsible, be thought 
of and prepared for by whatever proper character- 
building can do in wisest, most intelligent anticipa- 
tion. 

With the crisis passed, the heart beating safely 
again, the parental tension relaxes correspondingly ; 
yet parental guardianship must not fail to take on 
the new lines of devotion that are sure to be sug- 
gested. For often there have been laid foundations 
of pernicious habits which forever after will most 
effectually interfere with realization of anything like 



172 HIGHER LIVING 

the better living and full development that is de- 
sired. Often sickness has relaxed and subverted dis- 
cipline ; sometimes there are bodily results which must 
be regarded as naturally permanent; occasionally 
the little brain has received such a starving or poison- 
ing that, for long and possibly forever, the mind must 
be held in more or less abeyance. In any event, there 
are certain new aspects of the child which will need 
adequate study and direction. Not the same child 
has emerged from the sickness that was plunged into 
it. But in this there is no legitimate excuse for 
mismanagement, nor is there often cause for despair. 
Take things as they are ; improve them in every way 
practicable ; hope on, keep busy. Life, even marred 
and maimed life, is mouldable for better, as well as 
in other ways. Some of the grandest triumphs of 
parental skill and devotion have been wrested from 
the very jaws of apprehended life-long decadence. 
God always smiles upon the perfect devotion of par- 
enthood, even though its gift and use be at best im- 
perfect ; and especially, when, in the midst of imper- 
fection, there is sedulously cultivated the founda- 
tions of that flower and fruitage, which are none the 
less surely realized in His good time. God crowns 
the parent who, because of due preparation of in- 
tellect and will, thus so truly manifests the divine 
patience and strength. 

Therefore" such an experience is one which should 
unfailingly lead parents to still better knowledge and 
control of self for the broader need which may de- 
velop subsequently. It seems hard for a mother to 
leave her sick or even dying baby for requisite exer- 
cise, food and sleep, yet none the less does duty to 



ACCIDENT: DISEASE: DEATH 173 

self, to the sick one, and to all the others, demand, 
in the light of present knowledge, just this, and noth- 
ing less. If it is often hard for the father to adapt 
himself to the gloom and strain of the sick-room or 
the death-bed, he will nevertheless not fail to fulfill 
some of the highest functions of his being, if he cour- 
ageously does so. If it is hard for both to inhibit 
alarming speech, to look cheerful, to " live natural," 
when the Death Angel hovers near; yet let them re- 
member that the other little ones looking wonder- 
ingly on need just these self-same parents and all 
their disciplined, educatory life, now, as never be- 
fore. And when the fell crisis comes, if it is hard 
to subdue tears, to substitute smiles, to continue to 
be the same patient, comforting parents that the 
children have only known, let it not be forgotten that 
the impressions which parents themselves may now 
get by aiding in this wholesome way, may inspire in 
turn to a most determined effort to make even the 
going out of a life but the opening of a window for 
more life and light to enter in. Tears for the dead. 
Yes. But smiles for the living, as well, and in great 
evercoming abundance, for their sake, and — for 
ourselves ! 

" If God be good, why does he let this be, " cried 
the mother, as we watched the outgoing of the life 
of her only little one. " O, my God ! Take me, 
too ! " And we felt that the crudest irony of hu- 
man experience was distracting her, who, so far as 
we could see, deserved better. And the father tried 
to comfort her. " Don't, dear. Let us try to think 
it's all for good. Surely, God will not hurt our baby. 
There, there ! Let us not grieve too loud." But the 



174 HIGHER LIVING 

mother-face, if quieter, transmitted the unassuage- 
able heart-agony that millions of mothers had felt 
before her — of the Rachels who have never yet been 
quite comforted when this supreme trial of human 
nature has come. At such moments woman as 
woman contemplates in fear the probabilities of a di- 
vine blunder; as wife, she feels herself by just so 
much disproportioned and shrunken; as mother, a 
part of her very heart has been torn away, and her 
arms are " O, so empty." She now has fully 

" Recognized the nameless agony, 

The terror and the tremor and the pain, 
That oft before had filled or haunted me, 
And now returns with three-fold strength again " ; 

and life has grown hollow and aspiration timid, and 
— God seems very far off ! But here, too, let the 
resolve be once again: 

" We will be patient, and assuage the feeling 
We may not wholly stay; 
By silence sanctifying, not concealing 
The grief that must have way," 

and thenceforward press on as before for the living, 
who may now need us in our fullest strength and 
hope! 

And when the tear-reviving questions come, 
" Mamma, why don't Charlie wake up ? " " Where 
is heaven?" "Won't he ever come back?" Oh, 
what a time now for the whole family to grow in grace 
and knowledge — -in simplicity of conception, in 
kindly feeling for all mankind! To the winds now 
with incomprehensible creeds and Calibanic theolo- 



ACCIDENT: DISEASE: DEATH 175 

gies and misleading or conventional phrases: let the 
sweet comfort of a Father's love take their place. 
" As a father pitieth his children " ; " I am come that 
ye might have life " ; " We are His children just as 
you are ours ; we will love each other living, and God 
loves us, too." " In memory our Charlie will come 
back to us often, and we will be glad to go to him 
sometime." Of all things, let the entire home spirit 
and the hourly life be even such as will convince the 
young folk that no divine mistake has been made, no 
distrust is to prevail, no hope has been overshadowed. 
What parents and children both affirm and confirm 
now will never leave them in time or eternity. Do 
we not all remember the sweet-faced mother who said 
to her puzzled boy : " I bore, I tended and I trained 
your little sister for my Father, and now He has 
come for her " ? And the good man by her side, who 
at another time said : " Yes, my son, that is what we 
are all for; let us always be ready to go when He 
calls ! " 

Yes, the problem of the empty cradle is always in- 
deed a serious one. As it presents itself concretely, 
there is not only the shock and the lonesomeness that 
will not be assuaged, but there may be the intrusive 
and disturbing fear of mistake, the unf aith that comes 
from narrowed consciousness, and the brooding which 
anthropomorphises God so completely that his di- 
vine nature is eclipsed. And, generally speaking, the 
brighter and more intelligent the parents are, the 
keener the suffering, the more complete the benumb- 
ing of the deeper self. As yet this is so, and for a 
time must be so. But later on, however, it will not be 
so ; for each hour brings the revelation nearer to us 



176 HIGHER LIVING 

all, that, instead of supernatural blundering, and 
cruelty, and selfishness, which must be blindly strug- 
gled with and met as best it may be by ignorant, timid 
mankind, there is everywhere, over all, through all, in 
all, the divine All-capable principle itself. Indeed, let 
us implicitly and always believe that, had we all a 
better, more complete knowledge of the Creative En- 
ergy and his purposes and his methods, as well as an 
increase of the confidence and happiness which comes 
from learning the divine lessons that have been set 
for us and developed in each human experience, we 
should certainly be conscious of a growth of breadth 
and power and skill along universal lines, and a 
deepening and widening of faith, that as mankind 
lives more truly like brethren of one household and 
as little children in the school of a Father, each 
selfish interest will become subordinated to the good 
of all, and that even in case of death in the home- 
flock, we will be prompted only to that kind of re- 
action which stirs not to a hopeless sense of pessimism 
and failure, but to a sense of a generous renewing of 
heart-life, a quickening of wholesome trust, and an 
energizing in more intelligent ways, than ever before. 
Indeed, it may come to pass that we can even ask, 

" Should I not then be glad, 
And thanking God, press on to overtake ? " 

Practically-, untimely death of children or indeed 
of older people, should lead, instead of to despair and 
inaction, to a most industrious endeavor to ascertain 
the causes of the sad misfortune, and then most cer- 
tainly to make all such intelligent provision against 
recurrence, as may be possible. Each instance 



ACCIDENT: DISEASE: DEATH 177 

should be regarded as an opportunity, not alone to 
apply present knowledge and skill, but to learn how 
to do better. To neglect this opportunity may be 
next to committing nothing less than a serious crime 
against every member of the household as well as of 
the neighborhood. A death that leads to the more 
intelligent grasp of the causation and prevention of 
diseases may thus prove of supreme benefit, instead 
of the serious infliction that it otherwise is. 



CHAPTER XV 
DEATH OF A PARENT 



Be patient and wise ! The eyes of Death 

Look on us with a smile; her soft caress, 

That stills the anguish and that stops the breath, 

Is Nature's ordination, meant to bless 

Our mortal woes with peaceful nothingness. 

WILLIAM WINTER 

I sometimes think that if parents would deal rightly 
and truly with children about death, from the beginning, 
some of the fear of it might be taken away. It seems to 
me that it is partly because death is hushed up and 
ignored between them that it rests such a burden on the 
soul; but if children were told, as soon as they are old 
enough, that death is a part of nature and not a calami- 
tous accident, they would be somewhat strengthened to 
meet it." william dean howells 

How fair you are, my mother! 

Ah, though 'tis many a year 

Since you were here, 
Still do I see your beauteous face, 

And with the glow 

Of long ago. 
So gentle, too, my mother! 

Just as of old, upon my brow, 

Like benedictions 
Falleth your dear hand's touch; 

And still, as then, 
A voice that glads me over-much 

-Cometh again, 
My fair and gentle mother ! 

EUGENE FIELD 



CHAPTER XV 
DEATH OF A PARENT 

Nothing seems more imperative than where there 
are children there should continue to be actual par- 
ents to provide for and companion them, even until 
such time as they may become men and women them- 
selves. Indeed, if prolonged infancy is itself as sug- 
gestive of unique possibilities as John Fiske repre- 
sents, it certainly follows that prolonged parent- 
hood is especially significant and imperative, also. 
More than this, if we say that no matter what hap- 
pens human parents and children never separate, we 
but affirm that the spirit of parenthood is a perma- 
nently impressive one and that of childship as per- 
manently receptive. Wide space may separate 
bodies and other persons may widely divert attention 
and companionship ; but in the essential family life 
there is no absolute loosening of the hold that par- 
ents and children have upon one another. 

Yet, it certainly seems otherwise when death enters, 
as for instance when the most beloved or the most 
promising child is borne away. But is it so? Who 
of the whole household continues to be more truly 
present than just this absent one, abiding yet in all 
the fond memories and heart throbs of the parental 
spirit ? " Taken from my arms and put in my 
heart," said one mother; and no parent can lose the 
unceasing influence of this wonderful translation of 

181 



182 HIGHER LIVING 

progeny. If there really be any such thing as an in- 
stance in which there is no such heart absorption, 
then certainly there is to be discovered one of the 
cruelest perversions of Providence imaginable! 

Yes, the very cruelest known, unless we except the 
instance where, instead of the child, a parent dies. 
Here, if anywhere, has human nature a perfect right 
to doubt God's wisdom and goodness, and to feel the 
inadequacy of human knowledge and skill. That 
children should be deprived of just the natural kind 
of protection, companionship and love that only the 
parent can provide, is often the source of a terrible 
doubt, one that is difficult truthfully to supersede or 
remove. For, unquestionably, the truth always is, 
that somewhere there has really been a mistake; and 
it is only as we learn that the mistake is not God's* 
but mankind's that we begin to see that it is hu- 
manity's privilege, if not to have prevented this, then 
promptly to learn how to provide against such 
sources of sorrow in the future, either on the part of 
this generation or of subsequent ones. When par- 
ents die, it may not always appear either that they 
themselves have been especially to blame; yet, that 
someone has been, and that this particular death 
ought not to have occurred, is clear enough. In 
this connection, as in that of the death of children, 
Providence is humanity itself, in that we ourselves, 
being in and of this divinity, are privileged to learn 
how to meet each ominous, painful fact of life with 
the knowledge that eternalizes it all, and with the 
joyous expectancy that assuringly connects every- 
thing with an immediate heaven. It is our own 
ignorance, if anyone's, not God's ; it is our blunder- 



DEATH OF A PARENT 183 

ing, our bad faith, our wayward selfness, and with 
little or no mitigation, which makes the lifeless cradle 
or crib so truly the grave of our better nature. 
Naturally so, too; because, as yet, we ourselves are 
but children in our comprehension of the larger 
meanings of life and our power to overcome evil with 
good. Miranda knew not, and feared; her father, 
Prospero, knew, and was not troubled. And, so very 
childish are we in all our ways of attributing to the 
Universal Parent what we but half see as truly be- 
longing to our own specific parenthood, that there 
is no wonder at all that very many of the seeming 
failures of the kindest, truest parent, or physician, 
or nurse, or even of the larger Being, often appear 
questionable and cruel and unjust. Yet, we know 
that everywhere the parent heart pities, the parent 
hand tries to guide and protect, and truly as an ap- 
propriate expression of only the very best will and 
wish for the prosperity of its child. And so, sup- 
posing that for the time being we can see only evi- 
dence of mistake or injustice or wanton cruelty; let 
us always remember that the higher, broader com- 
prehension of the Heavenly Parent may always trust 
that there is a perfect process of discipline, instruc- 
tion and growth underlying even the saddest experi- 
ence, and that there is no real evidence of unkindness 
or injustice, at all. 

As a matter of fact, how often does even that other, 
the saddest of all experiences, when little children are 
left without parents, prove to be a source of the very 
best influence known. If the child is never essentially 
separated from its parents even by the grave, it may 
be as truly said also that the parent cannot be 



184* HIGHER LIVING 

abstracted from the child nature by anything, even 
by death. When 

" The angel with the amaranthine wreath " 

calls at the home door and leads the parent, and 
especially the mother, away with him, and there is 
nevermore the all-assuaging response to the childish 
call, it would seem as though the day of a most hope- 
less separation had come, and that those who so need 
to have it otherwise are thus brutally robbed of their 
best heritage ; never to be restored ! 

But again is it so? In answer, let us go back to 
a September morning, some three score years ago. 
For weeks, there had been all the visions in depress- 
ing succession of the pale, agonized face, growing 
evermore sickly ; all the strain of unnatural quiet, the 
wonder at the doctor's many visits, the ache of un- 
wonted confusion, incident to the progress of dan- 
gerous disease. And now, upon so peaceful a Sab- 
bath morning, there was heard an unnatural whisper, 
" Come." Outside, the old farm home floods of sun- 
shine; within, shadows of the passing Death-angel; 
in a moment, a thin, trembling hand of blessing upon 
a little boy's head; a far-away voice of mortal fare- 
well ! Afterwards, in a day or two, the standing of 
the ministering shepherd by the plain coffin side, with 
all the people quiet or sorrowing; and, finally, the 
lifting up for the last shrinking look ; then, soon, in 
simplest manner, the following in the long train 
of neighbors and friends. But here remembrance 
ceases. 

The grave, since visited so many times, must have 
been there on that very day; but the face had been 



DEATH OF A PARENT 185 

covered, and the boy had been told that his mother 
was dead! 

As the years passed on, with so much of dispirit- 
ing burden-bearing and sorrow, there have come out 
from the depths of oblivion certain bright flashes 
which have never failed to assure and comfort ; — of 
mother and boy romping under the trees or building 
trains and machinery out of convenient odds and 
ends ; of a stormy winter's day, and both oh ! so 
safe, in a most wonderful house built of chairs and 
furnished with ever so many good things, some of 
them to eat; of love-chats in front of the open fire, 
or while crooning together in an old-fashioned cradle, 
for the occasion transformed into a rocking-chair; 
of certain hours of correction or reproof, one, espe- 
cially, in which but a look unlocked the whole latent 
moral sensibility ; of the first trousers, and a visit to 
the itinerant daguerreotype gallery ; of never-failing 
lullabies and caresses and sweet smiles, in spite of 
pain ; — how these all kept returning to the con- 
sciousness of the growing child, and how the gray- 
haired man still experiences, as vividly as ever, the 
sweet blessedness of even so short-lived a mother-and- 
child companionship ! 

They said she was dead. I more surely know that 
she has always lived, now lives, will live; for her 
sweet, clear soul inspired her son to an eternal cer- 
tainty, that the true mother never, never dies. And 
I would that the spirit promotive of this most sig- 
nificant faith might make hallowed and convincing to 
all the knowledge, that the parental soul never ceases 
from its vital brooding over the children of its tra- 
vail; and that in this most human-divine fact is to 



186 HIGHER LIVING 

be found the clearest revelation of the best relation- 
ship this world can ever know, — the tri-unity of 
father, mother, child, bound eternally in one mani- 
festation of divine love! 

Mothers — parents — die out of children's lives ? 
No. So long as life holds, the bond of procreation 
holds, and this is everlasting. Moreover, all the 
parental feelings, thoughts and acts constitute a 
most dynamic milieu, in which, and largely accord- 
ing to which, the child formation must proceed ; and 
so, when parents die, then also do their very spirits 
necessarily immortalize themselves in uninterrupted 
suffusion and permeation of the child-heart and 
mind. It needs no new embodiment; the child's own 
impressionable nature is the medium of this ; and 
even though it be something so intangible that it 
eludes even our appreciation, almost, yet it is so po- 
tent withal that no pen can describe its far-reaching 
influence. Blessed unity of parent and child — 
manifestation of the one spirit of Universal Love. 
Into thy daily realization let the sacredness of a most 
gracious ideality flow unimpeded, until such time as 
for all mankind there shall be the consciousness that 
for children of the heavenly parent, 

" There is no death ! What seems so is transition/' 

and that the transition itself is but an unique oppor- 
tunity for most vital transformation, step by step, 
into all that is high and pure! 

So, then, when death robs children of parents, in- 
stead of questioning Providence, let the other, nobler 
thought be permitted to occupy attention — the 
thought that, if in our ignorance and poor skill we 



DEATH OF A PARENT 187 

cannot always obviate untimely death, we certainly 
should not cease trying to do so with ever-increasing 
success ; moreover, that if the love that is once in- 
carnated in a child is capable of persistent influence, 
then let us who still live help to realize this most fully, 
even by unceasing universalization of the parenthood 
of our own lives, unto the bettermost end. 

All this is certainly due the remaining children of 
the bereaved household, in order that not only these 
simple lessons may be exemplified in all their lives, 
but that a somewhat different idea and practice con- 
cerning the general fact of death may be commonly 
adopted by every one with whom they come in con- 
tact. No child should be allowed to get lugubrious, 
terrorizing ideas and feelings about death, and be 
thus forced to go perhaps all through life with them. 
As already said, when death comes, it should be re- 
garded simply as a natural event in the course of 
Providence, and altogether so natural, so wise, so 
good, that even in the midst of our grief and loss 
we may grow stronger and more sympathetic and 
tender toward others, and so, be better prepared than 
ever before to help all human life in whatever need it 
may be found. The fact is, grief, even if natural 
and worthy of deepest respect, is usually so apt to 
be charged with misleading selfishness that it largely 
misses if not entirely forfeits this truth. No one 
has a right unduly to impose his sorrow upon others, 
and especially upon children, beyond reasonable 
limits. As soon as possible after every death of 
someone dear, let there be a veritable resurrection in 
our own experience — one which shall show the world 
that even here we triumph over death itself, by the 



188 HIGHER LIVING 

undying vitality of our spirits. If we can learn 
rightly to do this, children will commonly learn to 
look upon death, not as an " enemy " to be shrunken 
from and brooded over and hated, but as a tender 
heaven-like occasion for culture in the Higher Living 
which always has its roots, not in a " special provi- 
dence " that must necessarily favor the few at the 
expense of the many, but in the one grand, general 
Providence that has always so ordered and con- 
ducted things heretofore, that everyone may as surely 
as life itself trust its provision for the hereafter, 
and go cheerily on to learn the best lessons, get in- 
spiration, have true fellowship, and eventual self- 
realization — in fact, fully to gain the child-spirit 
renewed within, and so be ready for the great trans- 
formation, in turn. 

Yes, up from the awe and dreariness and sadness 
of the home death-hour, let there ever arise the 
shining snow-white angels of perfect trust, of brave 
up-looking and up-reaching, and even of joy in the 
love and pity wherewith He hath regarded us ! Like 
a dove, the spirit of peace and holy energy will then 
settle upon our heads, and our songs shall even here 
be not of bewailing and trepidation, but always of 
praise and exultation ! 



CHAPTER XVI 
HIGHER EDUCATION 



I have thirsted to know things, and to make the most 
of them. The universe is to me a grand spectacle that 
fills me with awe and wonder and joy, and with intense 
curiosity. john burroughs 

We cannot abolish fate, but we can in a measure 
utilize it. thomas carlyle 

In whatever studies we may select for our school 
course, we should lay emphasis on training in principles 
rather than on attention to details. 

ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

Better to stem with heart and hand 

The roaring tide of life, than lie, 
Unmindful, on its flowery strand, 

Of God's occasions drifting by! 
Better with naked nerve to bear 

The needles of this goading air, 
Than in the lap of sensual ease, forego 

The Godlike power to do, the Godlike aim to know. 

JOHN G. WHITTIER 

Our real inner life is not a complex of elementary sen- 
sations, as psychology may see it; it is a system of atti- 
tudes of will, which we do not perceive as contents of 
consciousness, but which we live through, and objects of 
will which are our means and ends. 

HUGO MUNSTERBERG 

We did not. make the world, and are not responsible 
for its state ; but we can make life a fine art, and, taking 
things as we find them, like the wise men, mould them 
as may best serve our own ends. 

J. H. SHORTHOUSE 



CHAPTER XVI 

HIGHER EDUCATION 

When one of the pupils of Euclid, the mathema- 
tician, asked, " What do I get by learning these 
things ? " the wise teacher called a servant, and com- 
manded, " Give him a sixpence, since he must make 
gain out of what he learns." Ever since that ancient 
hour, the question as to what education is most de- 
sirable or most needed by the developing personality, 
the ideal, the abstract, the theoretical, on the one 
hand, or the practical, the concrete, the useful, on 
the other hand, has remained without convincing 
answer. Today, as then, parents and educators are 
merged in two camps under opposing leadership and 
contest the matter with all the skill and thought the 
problem seems to demand. Until very recently al- 
most every high school and college was dominated by 
the ideas and influence of Plato, and those who be- 
lieve with his extreme elucidator, Plotinus, that mind 
is the one thing that should chiefly be provided for 
and the body left to take its natural course as may 
happen. But now there is increasing evidence of a 
wide-spread revolt against this one-sided view of edu- 
cation, and we see opinion and practice rapidly 
swerving clear over to the opposite extreme, where 
the bodily, the practical, the dollar value, is made 
much more of than the academic and the disciplinary. 
No one seems quite certain however as to the re- 

191 



192 HIGHER LIVING 

spective values of the old imperative curriculum con- 
fined to its classics and mathematics almost exclu- 
sively, and the newer ones wherein elective courses in 
sciences and art and industries are similarly exalted 
and exploited. The confusion and perplexity and 
indecision growing out of this are painfully great, 
and growing more so. Yet, one hesitates even to at- 
tempt to offer suggestions with a view to bettering 
matters, for fear of undesignedly making the situa- 
tion more disturbing than ever, rather than less. 
However, Higher Living demands that this attempt 
be made, and promises compensating results if it be 
at all successful. 

There can be no question whatever that every boy 
and girl should be given all the education and train- 
ing that is possible. Leaving off at any point be- 
fore what is needed has been accomplished is so seri- 
ous as to be scarcely less than criminal. In this re- 
spect, parents often make the mistake that can sel- 
dom if ever be corrected, and that is apt to be 
counted against their wisdom, if not their devotion, 
in after life. How easily little things are unneces- 
sarily allowed to break off the school or college 
course may be noted in every neighborhood. " Over- 
stud} r " (humbug, generally), foolish " sickness," dis- 
like of or quarrels with teachers, social distinction, 
bald laziness, -neglected sense organs, " bad blood," 
lack of interest, home needs or preferences, vitiating 
community spirit — most of which or all are no good 
reasons whatever, and generally too silly to be con- 
sidered as sufficient justification for any such import- 
ant decision — these are some of the filmy " excuses " 
which are allowed to determine the life destiny of alto- 



HIGHER EDUCATION 193 

gether too many children and youth, to go without 
intelligent and strenuous protest. The fact is, every 
one of these budding personalities should be kept in 
such physical order, and should be so wholesomely 
encouraged and constrained and restrained, that is, 
cheered and directed, that there will be no thought of 
discontinuing the proper educational courses, until 
these shall have been extended sufficiently for the effi- 
cient life that will be demanded, later. Prematurely 
breaking off and hastening into practical life is about 
the worst of all the blunders conceivable. 

Having decided that the education processes shall 
not be cut short, except for unforeseen tangible and 
serious reasons, until a reasonable limit has been 
reached, then follows the equally crucial decision as 
to what line or lines of education shall be selected, and 
where they can be pursued with greatest prospect and 
promise. Here again is met a puzzle that is seldom 
solved to the personal satisfaction of either parent 
or child. The parents, feeling that they are bound 
to make more or less of a personal sacrifice, seek to 
find the best school or college within their means that 
will place their child at a better advantage before 
the world than they themselves have enjoyed. If 
restricted in funds, the one closest at hand or smallest 
in fees and other expenses is likely to be chosen; if 
not thus restricted, then the one is chosen that com- 
ports most nearly with their notions of respecta- 
bility or scholarship or of practical advantage. In 
either case, the pupil himself, unformed, inexperi- 
enced, and prepossessed, as he is, quite as frequently 
as otherwise casts the deciding vote. With him, how- 
ever, it is likely to be much more a matter of influ- 



194 HIGHER LIVING 

ence and guidance of school acquaintance, or hear- 
say attractions, often of a relatively unimportant 
order, than of solid worth and prospective solid re- 
sults. With him, as with his parents, the determin- 
ing feeling has not been brought about by the full 
intelligence and the wise discrimination that alone 
are sufficient to justify the final decision, in the par- 
ticular instance. Nobody as yet has decided where 
the particular pupil ought to go in order really to get 
the instruction and discipline that his own distinctive 
nature needs. Evidently this method of choosing a 
school or college should everywhere be superseded 
by one that will more fully respect the pupil's actual 
needs and potentialities. The wastage of time, en- 
ergy and money, to say nothing of zest and happi- 
ness, in this connection, is simply incalculable. 

When the choice has once been made and the par- 
ents have once settled down to their long period of 
sacrificial support and variable hope, and perplexing 
wonder at what from time to time is really being or 
may be accomplished, the career of bungling indis- 
crimination and action is not finished, by any means. 
No one as yet having discovered in what direction this 
particular personality should be led educationally, 
no one having found out what it really needs or how 
it will best expand and grow strong and useful, it 
would seem as if those " higher up " would certainly 
be able to see this within a reasonable time, and be 
able to act upon their vision with sufficient wisdom, 
promptness and despatch. But practically this is 
as seldom the case as with parents or student. If 
one reads any long series of biographies, like those 
to be found in the " English Men of Letters," for in- 



HIGHER EDUCATION 195 

stance, one is apt to get more and more surprised 
than instructed, at the frequency with which school 
and college life seems not to have done at any time 
what was needed, to say nothing of what was ex- 
pected by those who bore the burden. In fact what 
Sir Humphrey Davy wrote to his mother, when well 
enough along in life to make his words tellingly sig- 
nificant, may stand as fairly descriptive of the ex- 
perience of the school life of the exceptional minority, 
at least. " I consider it fortunate," said he, " that 
I was left so much to myself when a child, and put 
to no particular plan of study, and that I enjoyed 
much idleness at Mr. Coryton's school. I perhaps 
owe to these circumstances the little talents that I 
have and their peculiar application." Now this 
leads us to ask emphatically, Why was young Davy 
sent to and left in that particular school at all, if 
it was so unfitted to do him much good? He cer- 
tainly did not remain for any real reason ; the rather 
he stayed there because it was thought to be the thing 
needed instead of the thing really known to be needed. 
Neither his mother nor the school authorities appear 
to have actually known anything that justified them 
in keeping the boy there rather than somewhere else. 
Fortunately his own inclinations served to help him 
" elect " a worthy purpose, if not the one that was 
laid before him. His natural passion for knowledge 
was more important here than all the pedagogical 
wisdom that was brought to bear upon him. But, 
suppose his natural passion had been for idleness 
and a good time generally ! Would the pedagogical 
genius of the times have been more reliable in this 
case? The careers of numberless boys and men 



196 HIGHER LIVING 

prove that it would not have been, and that their own 
" elective " course in their cases turned out unreli- 
able and fatal. Who then is going to solve it aright, 
when the problem of higher education comes before 
the anxious parental or student mind? 

It stands as a matter of reason that no one ought 
to be so well qualified to direct aright, as the par- 
ents themselves. From birth on, they have had the 
child constantly under observation, and ought to have 
learned where his weak spots and failings and wrong 
tendencies are, if anyone. During all the years it 
should have become more and more to them, that 
something particular and real was needed to fit their 
child for the strains and struggles of the life that 
they are to see ahead of him. They ought now to be 
able to say whether one thing or another will be best 
adapted to round out the character, provide the in- 
strumentalities, and open up the way that the future 
will demand. But are they, do they, as a rule ? No, 
and simply because they believe they can rely upon 
someone else, or are made by authority to rely upon 
someone else, to make the choice for them. The state 
does this imperatively for most children during four- 
teen of the most plastic years of the young life, and 
custom and thoughtlessness and prejudice and cus- 
toms, do it for the rest of the time. This should not 
be. Instead, the parents, who have thrust their 
progeny upon the world, should make themselves 
qualified by study and thought and observation to 
decide for their children in a way that will prove the 
right one for them distinctively. Especially should 
they at the beginning get for themselves a clear no- 
tion of what higher education of any sort should 



HIGHER EDUCATION 197 

give or do for their children. They should have de- 
cided beforehand whether their children are simply to 
be trained for some practical end, alone or chiefly, or 
to be developed and furnished in such a way that all 
of the after life and every element of character build- 
ing shall tend to full realization of the nobler and 
completer outcome. The end of all education is some 
kind of supposed betterment and greater ability to 
do something and enjoy the world we live in. But 
what kind of betterment, is the question that parents 
themselves should devote themselves assiduously to 
finding an answer that promises the best for each 
particular child. " Education," says Miinsterberg, 
" is to mould the personality and make it able and 
willing to serve the realization of ideals." Here we 
have it all in a nutshell. A personality to mould, 
ability and intelligence to secure, an ideal to aim at, 
and service in obedience to all — these comprehend 
the true principles underlying a satisfactory educa- 
tion. This is the education that will enhance one's 
ability not only to get and possess, but to appreci- 
ate all that life brings to one's hand. Every parent 
should study the child's needs from this more compre- 
hensive point of view, and should not forget for a 
moment while stud} T ing the warning of another phil- 
osophic educator, the poet Schiller : " Woe," says he, 
" to the father who by a culpable tenderness hath 
frustrated the activities of a higher wisdom." This 
means, that the child as he is, as he looks, as he needs, 
as is possible for him, should not be mistaken for one 
of straw, or worse, one of " sloppy " imagination. 
Higher Living demands that the facts of each person- 
ality as it is and as it potentially may be should be 



198 HIGHER LIVING 

sternly considered by all who would essay to decide 
upon the higher educational courses. Without due 
consideration of the facts and potentialities, it mat- 
ters little where they may be sought or what they 
may do. In school or in college or in neither, the 
chances are about equal that serious mistakes will be 
made. Only those who best know the temperaments 
of those concerned can have any reasonable expecta- 
tion of being rightly helpful, no matter how they feel 
or what they do. Much more important is it that 
wisdom should be exercised in this direction, than that 
exceptional skill in providing for any special career 
should be trained. A wise parent, one replete with 
the knowledge and force that he should have, can 
be the all in all of influence in the prospective lives 
of his progeny. Says John Fiske of his two emi- 
nent friends, Herbert Spencer and John Tyndall: 
" Neither went to college nor studied according to 
the ordinary routine, and both received marked intel- 
lectual stimulus from their fathers." And so every 
father may be sure that his wisdom will as surely 
become a chief part of their educational furnishing 
as it is devotedly and positively exercised. And, as 
to his reward, we have the assurance of an authority 
that has never been gainsaid: A wise son maketh 
a glad father, — a father, we may be sure, who will 
in turn impart his wisdom to those who come after 
him. 

As an illustration of the relative worth of a right 
kind of education and a wrong one, let us take a walk 
across the fields with a representative of each. The 
companion who has been trained to some narrow in- 
dustrial life sees but little along the way that cannot 



HIGHER EDUCATION 199 

be turned into some cash-paying enterprise, and is 
impressed accordingly. His vision of the environ- 
ment is thus narrowed, and his mind thus preoccupied 
with what in itself, if legitimate enough, is but of 
limited satisfaction eventually. The other compan- 
ion, the one who has been rightly educated to see 
deeply and broadly, to think comprehensively and to 
enjoy every aspect of every outlook, may in his way 
also see how the neighborhood can be improved so as 
to render much greater profits than now ; but he can 
see also what is denied to his companion, all the 
beauty, the history, the variable use and worth of 
the landscape — the geology, the botany, the biol- 
ogy, the astronomy, the poetry and art and natural 
religion — all that the landscape holds and offers 
generously to everyone who can fully see, think of, 
and appreciate. Ever after, when the mind of the 
two men revert to this particular walk, what a differ- 
ence in content and scope and satisfaction will accrue 
to them! To the mind of the rightly educated man 
there must also come pre-eminent satisfaction that he 
was prepared to reap so lavishly. To the wrongly 
educated man must there not come sorrow, instead, 
that there had been such a narrowing blunder in his 
preparation for life ? If there does not, then is there 
added another source of sorrow still, in that he must 
go until life's end so blind to the higher satisfactions 
and the better compensations. Not what is for us, 
but what we can appropriate and appreciate, enters 
into our deeper natures and makes us glad. 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 



The intelligence of each year of growth is commonly 
misunderstood by those who are called on familiarly to 
observe it, and very few apprehend the zones of change 
through which a clever girl approaching womanhood is 
apt to pass, or understand that temporary displays of 
caprice or coarseness, or melancholy, or irritability are 
only expressions of physiological changes consistent with 
general healthy growth. s. weir Mitchell 

Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite 
apart from any fluctuations that went before, — conse- 
quences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves; and 
it is best to fix our minds on that certainty instead of 
considering what may be the elements of excuse for us. 

GEORGE ELIOT 

It is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a 
heavy ballast of principle. c. d. warner 

Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the 
crime, is itself, in intellectual matters, a crime of the 
first order. Joseph joubert 

If a man knew all good and evil, and how they are, 
and have been, and will be produced, would he not be 
perfect, and wanting in no virtue whether justice, or 
temperance, or holiness? He would possess them all, 
and he would know which were dangerous and which 
were not, and guard against them whether they were 
supernatural -or natural; and he would provide the good 
as he would know how to deal both with gods and men. 

SOCRATES 



CHAPTER XVII 
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 

Who shall suitably portray the gradual descent of 
the life-currents from careless, free, joyous child- 
hood, through youth into the oftentimes fell Avernus 
of what is called adolescence? Strange indeed have 
been, before this change takes place, the notable re- 
mouldings of the body outlines ; equally strange, as 
we have seen, the changes in thought and feeling; 
strange too the new courses of conduct that are de- 
veloped, as these unsteady steps toward adulthood 
are taken by the rapidly-growing, much anticipating 
organism ! 

Concerning the characteristics presented by ado- 
lescence, especially in its earlier stages, it should be 
remembered that they are directly attributable to the 
using up of force by the peculiar development of the 
organism, just preceding this time. So rapid, often 
so cyclonic, has this been, that everything else, from 
digestion to muscular activity, from heart to brain, 
from sensation to imagination, has had to be more 
or less denied, in order that sufficient nutrition and 
force could be afforded for the development of the 
specific sexual organs and functions. Generally 
speaking, it has truly meant what Rousseau called, 
" a new birth " of vital activity. Increase in size 
has been and often still is very rapid, requiring un- 
usual amounts of food and prolonged periods of 

203 



204 HIGHER LIVING 

sleep, alternating with appropriate exercise, to main- 
tain it. Because of this there is also unusual lia- 
bility to what are called perversions of nutrition, and 
consequently to a consequent loading of the various 
tissues, and especially of the blood, with certain 
products that are veritable poisons, which may be 
so persistent in their effect that often the whole 
health career of the individual is predetermined by 
them. Again, the heart, although proportionately 
increased in size, beats weaker and often slower; the 
appetite is capricious or poor, and the digestion is 
variable in regularity and completeness ; the extremi- 
ties are cold and weak; excretion is interfered with 
and altered in character; the brain easily fags, and 
the intellect and feelings become, either irresponsive 
or whimsically responsive even to stimuli that are 
most appropriate. Along with all this, attention 
and judgment are more or less perverted and unre- 
liable, and things absolutely harmful are very apt 
to become as fascinating as they are apt to be mis- 
leading and destructive. Altogether, the condition 
is one giving evidence of scattered force, seeking con- 
centration; of unreliable ideation and emotion, yet 
seeking appropriate expression; and of tendencies 
that are as full of danger as they are weak and 
variable. This is a time also when some of the most 
characteristic inherited traits first become manifest. 
One of the most important of these is the now clearly 
recognized condition known as " heterogeneous per- 
sonality," in which the several elementary charac- 
teristics of the two lines of ancestry have not been 
stably blended in progeny. Thus, it may have been 
noticed that a certain child one day or another, and 



THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 205 

for a longer or shorter period, had " favored " one 
parent or line of ancestry so unmistakably that it 
had seemed to be its descendant very chiefly; only, 
however, to disclose on some subsequent day or pe- 
riod a very similar likeness in reaction and conduct 
to the other parent or line of ancestry. This alter- 
nation of personality, which favors now one and now 
another side, is often not very apparent until the 
period of puberty and youth is approached. Dur- 
ing this period, however, it is a prolific source of the 
conflicts and exhaustions and deflections which so 
characteristically belong to it. Until now sleeping 
quietly in the cozy depths of the individual's nature, 
the rapid changes of impulse attendant upon this 
period serve especially to awaken untoward tenden- 
cies, which afterwards must be severely reckoned 
with, in connection with all that vitally concerns the 
developing organism. Especially is this the case in 
respect of certain predispositions to breaking down, 
either from irregular and insufficient development, or 
from disease and accident. While, on the one hand, 
curiously resisting acute diseases as never before, 
the organism at this time, on the other hand, is 
peculiarly liable to the development of certain affec- 
tions, especially of the nervous, the circulatory, and 
the respiratory systems, that are slow of develop- 
ment and apt to be lasting. 

Up until the time of puberty and early youth al- 
most all manner of experience had been impartially 
welcome, and responsibility for results had been 
either unregarded, or, effectually laid off upon oth- 
ers. Before this everything had been simple and 
almost always self-centered and self-measured. Now 



206 HIGHER LIVING 

begins the influence of a new series of suggestions, 
and the rise of certain new applications of old proc- 
esses to the solving of every vital question. Now 
there is introduced into consciousness the exception- 
ally dynamic appreciation of the fact of other selves, 
and of something of their needs in the animated 
struggles for existence and prosperity. For the 
child, if he only were self-satisfied and did not have 
to expect too severe a settlement in consequence, the 
world was pretty much all good and life all pleasur- 
able. Now, even when his own satisfaction requires 
that someone else shall enter in and be a partner of 
it all, its joys for him alone are seldom if ever more 
than half-joys. Something mysterious makes it so 
— but so it is ; as every young life more and more 
illustrates, and every attempt to have it otherwise 
ruthlessly discloses. 

Undoubtedly, during the period of youth and early 
adolescence there arises as never before a vivid con- 
sciousness of this new something within, which is cal- 
culated so influentially to stay and modify the whole 
course of life. As yet there have chiefly been felt 
the restraints of the outside forces found in the 
home, school, church, or society. With the rise of 
adolescence there has come the perception of a simi- 
lar restraint, welling up from the inner depths. Of 
course, it has been there in the making all through 
the years of childhood. Every act of obedience to 
outside dominance has paved the way for later recog- 
nition of the dominance within. But not until ado- 
lescence has there been a definite consciousness of 
this, or ability to refer it to its proper source. The 
adolescent knows that heretofore he has often had 



THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 207 

to put the brakes on or else run into danger. But 
not until now has the sense of this self-breaking — 
of " inhibition " as it is called — been clearly recog- 
nized as a part of his own constitution. This marks 
the sure advent of an epoch in his life, one which is 
to be freighted with many experiences, both strange 
and momentous, and yet which is so fascinating that 
he soon forgets his child-life, as something almost 
foreign to his history. Forever after this advent he 
must look back, if at all, through the dream-mists of 
his new life. 

With the child's experience of restraint, there had 
frequently enough been a transitory smart and dis- 
appointment and grief; but soon it would all get 
over, and the world appear again as full of joy as 
ever before. With the inhibition that develops later 
on, however, there is not only the deeper reaction 
toward discomfort, but a deeper and more permanent 
impression of it, one which will not be entirely super- 
seded by absolute return to joyousness, try as he 
will. By this time, the mere fact that others are 
considered renders such a return more difficult, and 
the probability of an organic resistance to such a 
return much more certain. The grooves of change 
now wear deeper and in a much more prophetic fash- 
ion than ever before; all the energies of body and 
mind tend to focus their activities in certain more 
definite directions ; the spirit seeks less diverting 
channels for exercise; everything is kept longer in 
consciousness, while the range of this is more or less 
narrowed in many new ways to correspond. 

Often, for a time but a single bodily habit, or idea, 
or cluster of ideas, will take almost absolute posses- 



208 HIGHER LIVING 

sion of the mind, and rule quite as tyrannically as 
interferingly ; while, if ideation or even bodily expe- 
rience in general is fertile enough, the whole accom- 
panying emotional tone is apt to become so changed, 
especially so lowered or erratic, that anything like 
an equally fertile exercise of mental and moral 
strength is denied. Says Dr. Folsom : " There are 
often excessive shyness or bravado, always intro- 
spection and self-consciousness, and sometimes abey- 
ance or absence of the sexual instinct, which, how- 
ever is often of extraordinary intensity. The imita- 
tive and imaginative faculties may be quick. The 
affections and the emotions are strong, vehement 
dislikes are formed, and intense personal attachments 
result in extraordinary friendships which not seldom 
swing around suddenly into bitter enmity or indiffer- 
ence. The passions are unduly in force in a char- 
acter which is said to lack will-power. The individ- 
ual's higher brain centers are not well inhibited, and 
he dashes ahead like a ship without a rudder. . . . 
Invention, poetry, music, artistic taste, philan- 
thropy, intensity and originality are sometimes of a 
high order among these persons ; but desultory, half- 
finished work and shiftlessness are much more com- 
mon. With many of them concentrated, sustained 
and persistent effort is impossible. Their common 
sense, their perception of their relations of life, their 
executive or business faculty and judgment are sel- 
dom well developed. The memory is now and then 
phenomenal. They are apt to be self-conscious, ego- 
tistic, suspicious and morbidly conscientious. They 
early become victims of insomnia, exhaustion, hypo- 
chondria or hysteria, and they offend against the 



THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 209 

proprieties of life and commit crimes with less cause 
and provocation than other persons. The majority 
possess an uncommon capacity for making fools of 
themselves, being a nuisance to their friends and of 
little use to the world." 

Such being the case, what wonder that even the 
semi-consciousness of all this is very apt to be more 
or less painful, and that to the young sufferer there 
is not very much presented that offers hope of im- 
provement ! The joy of child-life has been ex- 
changed for the pains of a new birth, which, how- 
ever, seem, upon the wisest possible estimate by those 
who have to endure them, to be almost as useless as 
they are permanent. Consequently, for his comfort 
as well as for his everlasting good, the sufferer should 
very early be made to know that his own experiences 
are not exceptional or individual, but common and 
racial. Let him learn also perseveringly to react to 
them with becoming intelligence, and wholesomeness. 
If he does, the organism itself will soon automatically 
respond more or less perfectly to the quieting influ- 
ence of curiosity satisfied, and of intelligence ap- 
proved ; and, in time, he will emerge from his storm 
and stress period with chances greatly improved for 
becoming an adult after his own best premonitions, 
as well as after approved standards. For, when 
properly taught, there comes, if slowly yet at last 
clearly, into view, the idea, that all this commotion 
of immaturity is beneficent, in that it leads to finding 
out the best means of conserving and developing 
every characteristic of the human spirit, and, what 
is better still, of directing it into the most satisfac- 
tory realization. 



210 HIGHER LIVING 

Moreover, every tendency tenaciously to hold pes- 
simistic or self-deprecatory ideas too closely, or to 
react badly to ordinary experience, should be vigor- 
ously supervised and guided. What though the day 
be cold — does the habit of reacting shiveringly do 
the human being any good ? What though pain does 
seize the head or back or stomach? The habit of 
making a fuss, of seeking baby-like to be coddled, or 
of drenching oneself with remedies, is neither develop- 
mental nor healthful. What though disappoint- 
ments big or little do come? Why, react to them 
resolutely as though all the world and all of life itself 
were at stake. What though repeated or persistent 
moodiness or low emotional tone does obtrude and 
dominate and cut one off from everything most de- 
sired or needed? Will an equally bad habit of re- 
acting help recovery or assure future happiness? 
Surely not ; and it were far better that, instead of 
the youth's being allowed to develop the habit of 
believing otherwise, someone competent should under- 
take thoroughly to instruct and convince him that 
every such significant fact in his character-building 
should neither be trifled with nor cowardly ignored. 
Let him patiently be led into the habit of thinking 
and affirming in detail that if one goes through life 
with head fallen, eyes to ground, heart foreboding, 
thought always perplexed, and feet and hands trem- 
blingly timid,' then, surely, will suffering appear only 
as the inexplicable fact, the useless travesty, the hor- 
rid evil, which degrades God himself, as well as con- 
demns man everlastingly. He should be taught that 
every form of suffering should preferably be allowed 
to work out just such beneficent effects in his nature 



THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 211 

and destirry as he reasonably desires and insists upon 
securing for himself ; also let him be influenced firmly 
to believe that if he walks the earth with tread as firm 
as the rock-bed itself, with head erect and self- 
carried, with eyes to sky or the distant horizon or 
upon the bright beauties everywhere abounding; if 
he walks with heart full of the joy which is indeed 
the " grace of God," with mind curious, alert, com- 
prehending much and appreciating all, with hope 
sure and steadfast; then, what matter indeed if he 
does come to be even permanently lamed, or blinded, 
or bethorned, or otherwise misfortuned? He never- 
theless knows and can appreciate so much that is en- 
joyable and useful and hopeful, that it is possible 
for him to see that even the blackest cloud, the storm- 
iest day, the most terrible pain, the deepest despair, 
the most unfortunate venture, may imprison a splen- 
dor that is his to realize, if only he wills to do so and 
learns how. In fact, such an one must come to real- 
ize eventually, that so long as he remains a sentient, 
impressionable, conscious being, just so long will 
there be, must there be, not only discouragingly pain- 
ful contrasts in his experience, but encouragingly 
joyous reactions and realizations, as well; and that if 
it were not so, he would surely atrophy and degener- 
ate, and be " lost " in an irrevocable sense. Every 
youth should be timely and thoroughly convinced 
that even severe pain itself, instead of being a merci- 
less foe, is very often the most beneficent friend of hu- 
manity, especially to those persons who have learned 
and who properly appreciate its influence upon the 
life of sentient and spiritual beings too thoroughly 
for reasonable doubt ; moreover, that this law of 



212 HIGHER LIVING 

growth by painful experience never fails of compen- 
satory rewards to those who fully appreciate it and 
persistently endeavor to profit by it. Really, " My 
yoke is easy," it says, " my burden is light " ; and so 
indeed it is, when compared with the chains and sor- 
rows that result from ignorance, and disobedience, 
and a too easy life. 

Keeping always in view, then, the conclusion that 
the only way by which the pains of this period as 
well as of later life can either be prevented or reme- 
died is through the application of accurate knowl- 
edge, and this in due season, we will all in time become 
thoroughly convinced that every youth should be 
taught that one of the most important things he 
can ever learn is how to find the good that lies hidden 
in all evil, and so to self-direct his life, in spite of 
pain and allied obstacles ; and that by habits rightly 
initiated and persistently maintained unto the very 
end, he will always be helped rather than hindered. 
For all experience shows that in this way can he 
best be able, at least to the most serviceable and per- 
manent extent, both to conserve the elements with 
which he is originally endowed, or to make them over 
into a better, more healthful order, for himself or the 
race. So true is this, that whenever later one does 
find himself sorely scattered, broken, impulsive, weak, 
wabbling, or. ill or dejected, he will proceed auto- 
matically and at once, not as many have been wont 
to do, foolishly to whine and give up or perhaps do 
worse still, but sensibly to clarify his aims, assume 
self -direction, and thoroughly to realize, through the 
force of habit in daily practice, just that very thing 
which he truly aspires to be, rather than the lesser 



THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 213 

thing that circumstances have seemingly tried to 
make him. In support of this, let, say, Professor 
James' chapter on " Habit " become the daily read- 
ing for a time: — note how this wise man so per- 
sistently inculcates the idea that by habitually prac- 
ticing that which we would become, we in time must 
surely become it, to the lessening or exclusion of all 
other growths. Let it also be clearly inculcated that 
mere sentimental wishes and resolutions avail little 
here, beyond a very simple and forceless initiative ; 
that even a whole night of prayer and most sincere 
promise or pledge, is easily dissipated by one sip of 
the intoxicant, or one kiss of waywardness ; that dal- 
liance with sensuality of any kind, even in imagina- 
tion, effectually neutralizes the influence of ever so 
genuine agonizing over foolish indulgence; that a 
single, irregular wastage of a night may and often 
does disturb the balance of nerve-tone and mental 
activity for days and weeks, or, possibly, forever, 
especially in some temperaments. Moreover, that 
even so must it ever be with gluttonous feasting; so, 
with the tides of feverish gaming; so, with uncalled- 
for pli3 T sica! recklessness even when dignified highly, 
as by the term " work," or " athletics." On the 
other hand, let it be made quite as clear that one 
can most confidently trust to well-selected beginnings 
and good continuings, permanently to secure the de- 
sirable and longed-for comfort and prosperity, — 
trust, in fact, that one day of doing what is abso- 
lutely right majr be the salvation start, or may be- 
come the dominant purpose and work, of one's whole 
life, and with corresponding satisfaction. For the 
one basal fact is this: just as are our initiations and 



£14 HIGHER LIVING 

our common habits of eating, drinking, and excret- 
ing; our habits of sensation, thought, or of self- 
directed emotion ; of imagination and aspiration ; and 
especially our habits of constantly and persistently 
acting in any particular direction; so, in fact, are 
and will be, every detail of our reactions to environ- 
ment ; so, in fact, are we, so may we be, will we ever 
attain and be, both in health and longevity. 

Youth should be taught universally to see for 
themselves that habit always depends absolutely on 
the power of initiative and repetition, plus that of 
persistent repression. Physiological psychologists 
tell us that, while certain other parts of the brain 
constitute the instrumentalities of the sensory-motor 
and automatic and impulsive activities, it is the fore- 
brain, so well-developed in man and so important, 
that is chiefly the seat of the higher powers — those 
of initiative and inhibition. It is these indeed that 
constitute the crowning characteristics of human 
beings — imagining, reasoning, idealizing and plan- 
ning far-reaching results. Undoubtedly, initiation 
and inhibition are the most important of all our char- 
acteristics ; but we must nevertheless not lose sight of 
the power of persistent self-activity and its ultimate 
usefulness in character-building, — the inherent 
power of the pulling-down self, or the lifting-up self, 
so frequently thought of as being of negligible conse- 
quence. Indeed, it is not unreasonable or mystical 
or imaginary to say with such students as, for 
instance, Wundt, that " there is always something 
more in our conscious life that can be summed up 
from its more obvious phases " ; in other words, that 
in addition to our thoughts and feelings as such, 



THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION 215 

there is always the something that we properly call 
" the Self," with all its determining force and direc- 
tion. And, I take it, we may all be, as well as 
actually will be, " distinguished," just to the extent 
only to which we possess or cultivate this self-same 
power of self-control and self-direction, and couple 
this with the energetic, intelligent, persistent activity 
of everything required by this. Nature may always 
be depended upon to furnish the requisite mechanism ; 
common consciousness to furnish the ideal ; practical 
experience to give sound hints as to the better way ; 
but we ourselves must always furnish the aim and the 
directing force, — something quite possible to us, gen- 
erally, if only we " will " to have it so. 

Undoubtedly the term " will " is a term much out 
of vogue in some circles ; yet science as well as expe- 
rience says, " Use your wills to keep your thoughts 
and feelings and efforts rightly aimed and going, and 
Nature will do the rest, without fail." In every 
clearly defined act of volition, the cue is taken from 
vivid ideas furnished by attention. Hence, if we 
learn to attend to proper ideas, we may be sure that 
entirely proper activities will flow naturally, even 
along the oftentimes much more useful lines of greater 
instead of lesser, resistance. Says Professor James 
again, " Habits of attention determine largely what 
experience shall be." Of course the line of least in- 
itiative and least resistance is commonly so attract- 
ive, that we readily yield to the " vertiginous fasci- 
nation " of the broader, seemingly easier, way ; and 
why we do this, we scarcely know. Nevertheless, this 
is neither the way of health nor of virtue, nor of life, 
in any better sense. Every such yielding, in no 



216 HIGHER LIVING 

matter what direction, may seemingly mean little or 
nothing at the time ; yet both experience and psy- 
chology teach us that every such yielding will surely 
leave its furrow, its stain, its rust ; and, like the scar 
after the wound, we must remain in consequence just 
so much disfigured and weakened forever after! 



CHAPTER XVIII 
ADOLESCENCE 



The senses folding thick and dark 

About the stifled soul within, 
We guess diviner things beyond 
And yield to them such yearning fond, 
We strike out boldly to a mark 

Believed in, but not seen. 

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 

All of us have our moral discontentments. We all 
think that society should be reformed in certain re- 
spects. Just to this degree each of us is moved to pre- 
scribe a rule of conduct in this case or that, since the 
publicity of the ethical judgment carries just this sort of 
presumption. mark Baldwin 

Be men, not beggars. Command all 
By one brave, generous action; trust 
Your better instincts, and be just. 

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

Personally * * * I have a passion for being inde- 
pendent of the world, and of every man in it. 

GEORGE RIPLEY 

Most people have no patience with the young skeptic, 
seeing only a venturesome and arrogant spirit and a few 
stale and threadbare doubts. To me, the doubts are less 
instructive than the fact of doubting, and what this fact 
means to the young soul feeling his way to an independ- 
ent, rational world-view. prof, duvall 

Have courage to use thine own understanding; become 
a man; cease to trust thyself to the guidance of others. 

IMMANUEL KANT 



CHAPTER XVIII 

ADOLESCENCE 

Adolescence, the period between youth and adult- 
hood, is often embarrassed by unexpected, perplexing 
and inexplicable doubt. For the first time do certain 
awful questions concerning existence and destiny 
arise. First, also, do criticisms respecting the com- 
moner problems of life and current teachings and ex- 
planations bring their own trains of trouble, while 
philosophy, religion and ethics hang in a balance 
that is apt to be weighted unduly in favor of the 
painful side. Happy the adolescent who does not 
have his experiences of doubt crystallize into a per- 
manent habit of doubting that can only be broken 
with difficulty, if at all. Many people are thus 
afflicted, and, not being able timely to recover them- 
selves, are obliged to go through the whole of after 
life doubting wholly or in part almost everything 
they have learned, and almost everybody they have 
come into contact with. Be it the strictest intellec- 
tual truth, the most scientific generalization, the 
clearest insight, the most useful practice, their own 
feelings or logical processes, or the future life, or the 
wisest and best people they have met — in every case, 
these people are apt to be held in the permanent 
grasp of such a nagging uncertainty that only dis- 
comfort and dissatisfaction are possible to them. 

This, however, is entirely a matter of peculiar con- 
219 



220 HIGHER LIVING 

stitution combined with wrong bringing up. If 
noted in childhood, it is generally easy to overcome 
it, by inculcating such habits of discrimination as 
will lead only to normal doubt concerning properly 
doubtful things. If first noted in adolescence, it is 
certainly incumbent on those who know the real sig- 
nificance of any sort of protracted wrong habit, to 
bestir themselves effectually to break this one up, 
and to substitute a better one in its stead. In at- 
tempting this, however, let it be the rule always, 
never to stop with negative instructions, or with pro- 
hibitive restraints ; but always and persistently to 
inspire and instruct and discipline the subject until 
more constructive habits shall be formed. Substitu- 
tion is here, as elsewhere, the plan by which evil can 
be effectually overcome. Put in the place of doubt- 
ing a rational belief in something worth believing, 
and, psychically speaking, the work is done. 

This leads logically to the conclusion that no ado- 
lescent's education should be considered complete 
until he has been trained in the wholesome practice of 
ascertaining the truth for himself, and in founding 
his belief, at any rate for the day, upon his own 
conclusions, even though these may have to be re- 
considered, or even corrected by others, later. The 
common practice of loading down the growing mind 
with all sorts of " improving " texts, obtrusively in- 
sisted upon and reluctantly or perhaps rebelliously 
accepted, is not the better way to establish the habits 
of reaction that will entirely and permanently suf- 
fice, either intellectually or morally. Every text, 
whether scientific, or esthetic, or ethical, or biblical, 
ought to be used rationally instead of authoritatively 



ADOLESCENCE 221 

for the building up of a mental foundation, which, in 
turn, can be confirmed, so far as possible, by the 
concrete experience of one's own individual life, and 
assented to by a mind first become alert and even 
eager to receive it. Indeed if every adolescent re- 
volted absolutely at every kind of " pedagogic stuff- 
ing," he could not from a psychological point of 
view be very truly blamed. Whatever may be for 
the best interests of his own nature, both innate and 
potential, ought to be developed naturally, or left 
to await a happier day. In the better days to come, 
this plan will prevail and ought to prevail univer- 
sally. How much better this will be is seen even 
now in the as yet very exceptional instances, where 
individual experience is taken account of fully and 
in due season, in order that it may have engrafted 
upon it, or rather diffused through it, such goodly 
stores of knowledge as may properly be related to it, 
and such principles of thought and conduct as will 
best use these in daily life. What is needed, is not 
volumes of discursive memorizings of notes of de- 
tached importance, but a systematized brain, and 
this to every extent needed for subsequent adult en- 
durance and service. 

Simply because they have never been taught thus 
systematically to pursue and ascertain the truth and 
be guided by their own independent conclusions, 
adults very frequently break down unexpectedly, 
perhaps in the very midst of the most useful 
period of their lives. What good is right motive, or 
abundant will power, if the actual results of one- 
sided development are defective and temporary, 
only? Little good, comparatively, when we estimate 



222 HIGHER LIVING 

what can be done or is done when the case is other- 
wise. Even before adolescence is fully passed, the 
individual is often obliged to assume responsibilities 
which at least imply self-dependence for insight, and 
method, and result. Shall he be denied the training 
best suited for securing this, and assuring its perma- 
nency, as well ? If he is thus denied, don't blame him 
for turning out to be either breakable, or even pur- 
chasable, when undue stress and wear shall have 
made some moment unexpectedly propitious. Of 
course, all through, there may be on the part of the 
adolescent himself many a silent yet none the less 
forceful protest against almost all the most whole- 
some pursuits — those which will most truly result 
in developing the self-reliance needed further on. 
Often, too, misleading conceit may be rapidly and 
unduly developed, and come later to be disastrously 
mistaken for genuine independence. So much the 
more need then of bringing to bear upon him suitable 
measures for supplementing these by a more modest 
conception of self and a greater determination to 
cultivate the elements which will promise the better 
outcome. 

Self -dependency in the pursuit of truth is neces- 
sary, then, in order that self-dependency of the indi- 
vidual in practical life may be assured. There is no 
more pitiable sight in society than the adult that 
has never yet been effectively weaned from the youth- 
ful dependence consequent upon his second birth. 
During adolescence there is almost always an irre- 
sistible yearning for the hypothetical support, sup- 
posed to be obtainable from other and especially 
older personalities. Often, very often indeed, for 



ADOLESCENCE 223 

the young man or woman there is no proper person, 
such as parent or older relative, with whom he or 
she can get on sufficiently intimate and safe terms to 
admit of all the confidences and reliances naturally 
needed during this period. As a matter of induc- 
tion from a large number of instances, the observer 
is prepared to say that a very high percentage of 
girls between twelve and seventeen years of age have 
no adequate fellowship with their own mothers, and 
that these in turn know almost nothing of the real 
life their young daughters are leading ; and, further- 
more, that this statement holds nearly equally true 
with respect to fathers and sons. This certainly 
constitutes one of the very saddest of observations ; 
for it is at just this age, when blossoming sexuality 
not only makes adolescents bashful, secretive, reti- 
cent or tricky, but also sneeringly doubtful of the 
wisdom as well as the unwisdom of their elders. Es- 
pecially is this the case, when these have not suitably 
prepared them for a just appreciation of their pe- 
culiar experiences, and worse still have given no 
promise of appropriate explanation or sympathy 
either at the time or in the near future ; — a condi- 
tion which is altogether too often found most seri- 
ously to interfere with whatever proper measures 
may be designed for relief of these troubles, later on. 
Certainly in any given case, these troubles are diffi- 
cult enough to manage, and always need the exercise 
of utmost skill, rather than ignorant, complaisant 
blundering of any sort. Yet, for reasons that often 
cannot be discovered, how often do parents, instead 
of proving to be to their rapidly developing progeny 
such veritable helpers, seem, on the contrary, to 



224? HIGHER LIVING 

forget all about this period of their own lives, and 
consequently allow themselves to be persuaded that, 
inasmuch as they themselves succeeded somehow in 
living through their own adolescent experiences with- 
out help, their children must of course necessarily 
be able to do so, likewise. Practically, however, it 
frequently follows — what parents cannot fully real- 
ize often until too late, — that just because of this 
lack of proper instruction and companionship at 
home, their children have naturally gravitated to 
outside parties, who have neither been, nor ever can 
be, sufficiently favorable to their best interests to be 
entirely trustworthy. Moreover, the adolescent is 
quite as frequently encouraged to cultivate even an 
exclusive dependence upon these same outside parties 
for all sorts of ideas and coddlings and helps, which 
he so naturally craves for, but which almost as often 
as otherwise result only in seriously interfering with 
a proper development of native strength and stabil- 
ity. Eventually, such an adolescent may find that 
he has thus actually been robbed of his own birth- 
right, that is, of his right to stand, and walk, and 
think, and feel for himself, and has been given for 
this in return much worse than a mess of pottage, 
namely, certain weak-kneed, slushy, emotional, 
wrong-minded habits of unsafe dependence, which 
prove entirely untrustworthy in times of stress, or in 
the presence of danger, where well-formed habits 
of independence — intelligent, strong, and right, — 
would prove to be so reliable and so satisfactory. 

Now, in the face of the consequences of such an 
untoward dependence on others, parents and every- 
one else who have to do with the guidance of young 



ADOLESCENCE 225 

people should labor forethoughtfully and hard to 
be acceptable and at the same time true helpers and 
true fellows in time of need; should labor in fact to 
inculcate and enforce habits of self-reliance and like- 
wise of self-determination of their own destiny, while 
not forgetting to be appropriately sympathetic with 
them in all the sore discomfort and dangerous lone- 
liness necessarily attendant upon the course of ado- 
lescent development. So often do these budding men 
and women exclaim, " I am so lonely ; no one seems 
to understand me ; what does everything mean, any- 
way? "; and, being unable satisfactorily to get right 
answers, or to explain things for themselves, and 
often unable to get help for their loneliness in their 
own homes, they rapidly become limp and dependent, 
and later so discouraged and perplexed that they 
seek what they imagine will help them at sources not 
more reliable than their own broodings, but only to 
suffer still greater disappointment and pain, later on. 
Hence it follows that parents themselves should seek 
to be as actually and as truly companionable with 
their adolescent children as possible, should study 
persistently and not haphazardly to understand 
them, and should see to it that each adolescent ac- 
quires the habit beyond deviation of ascertaining the 
truth, standing on his own feet, depending on his own 
resources, and assuming his own personal responsi- 
bilities, all according to the best ascertained laws of 
natural growth. 

All are agreed, scientist as well as educator and 
philosopher, that adolescence is likewise the time 
when religion, as a quieting substitute for under- 
standing of, and obedience to, law, is especially apt 



226 HIGHER LIVING 

to become an interest so warm and personal that it 
may possibly give wrong direction to the entire 
course of future development, instead of the right 
direction that is so sincerely desired. 

During childhood religious feeling, if experienced 
at all, is, with perhaps an occasional exception, apt 
to be too superficial to be lasting. But when the 
adolescent once becomes aroused to the importance 
of religion, the verymost depths of human nature are 
touched, and the results may be very permanent in- 
deed. Under the sway of some passing excitement, 
or as a result of inherited or early initiated charac- 
teristics, now first become consciously realized, the 
adolescent feels himself in the embrace of all that is 
holy, and realizes for the time being a kind of emo- 
tion so fascinating that it easily becomes " set " as a 
somewhat tyrannical standard of judgment and 
practice and aspiration for the near future, at least. 
Heaven and earth now seem surely able to meet in 
the heart of his own thought and feeling, and conse- 
quently he confidently expects heaven surely to draw 
near and envelopingly, while earth unclasps him as 
it recedes. Likewise also does he feel just as sure 
that now he must necessarily enter upon the way that 
leads to significant and unchangeable conclusions, 
and to equally important action, as well. 

Yet, it must be said that adolescent religious feel- 
ing, when wrongly understood and estimated and 
consequently mismanaged, as it so frequently is, may 
be, and unquestionably many times is, seriously det- 
rimental to the future interests of the individual. 
Being thus early and thoughtlessly set as a standard 
for guidance and attainment, it simultaneously seems 



ADOLESCENCE <m 

also to set a limit to the acceptance of those ideas 
and practices that are most serviceable for realizing 
the spiritual standard that his subsequent life re- 
quires for continued prosperity and ultimate salva- 
tion. If we note carefully one after another the 
people who from childhood on have been regular at- 
tendants upon religious services, it often seems very 
questionable whether or not they have actually grown 
in grace and knowledge to an extent corresponding 
to the sum total of their so much lauded " religious 
exercise." Of course, it is often said by way of con- 
clusive " explanation " that " they have not had 
faith enough," and the like. But there is really no 
necessity, in order to account for the paucity of 
results, thus to malign these truly good young peo- 
ple, even suggestively; the simple, sufficient fact be- 
ing, that all the supposed needed and acceptable 
means of grace, so early set for them, were set in such 
a narrow measure that they soon reaped the entire 
harvest within these limitations, and have gained little 
else since then. Upon their impressionable natures, 
the exclusive desirability or need of attaining to cer- 
tain fixed results, crystallized forms, lifeless formu- 
la?, and antiquated customs, were so early and so 
impressively fastened, that they have never been able, 
or else have never dared, to grow freely in any direc- 
tion, even within the stunting limits thus authorita- 
tively fixed and presented. Hence to blame them 
for not being more active and effective in spheres 
which their own experience has forced them to out- 
grow, or for not strongly feeling that the religious 
ideals of their earlier life are quite sufficient for all 
time, is as unjust as it is foolish. The real blame 



228 HIGHER LIVING 

lies conspicuously with those who failed to feel and 
think and act aright at the time when there was so 
much need of beginning what would have proved ac- 
ceptable and useful unto the end. 

The fact is, the Way of Higher Living from the 
beginning to the end requires of the religious experi- 
ence something very much more and very different 
than the usual course. It requires that the earlier 
estimation of the religious ideal shall be conceived as 
one implying perennial growth; that the individual 
shall be taught to feel that he has absolute right thus 
to grow continually toward an ever clearer and 
clearer standard, as well as to the use of every means 
which shall favor this progress ; that from time to 
time fresh forms of expression may be and shall be 
conceived and permitted, in which to note such 
growth, and accurately to convey to others the ever- 
more correct notions of processes and results ; and 
that results shall be estimated in terms of fidelity to 
growth, rather in those which express finalities of 
any kind. Nor should the growth encouraged ever 
be allowed to become one-sided. It is just as re- 
ligious, and is certainly just as Christian, to develop 
the body as the mind, and the mind as the spirit ; the 
sin in either case being that one is unduly developed 
at the expense of the others, and no corrective process 
admitted as being necessary. 

Again, simply because the earlier modes of reli- 
gious excitement tend to satisfy natural self-flattery 
is no reason why it should be allowed to set limits 
that shall subsequently interfere with proper devel- 
opment along altruistic lines. Every lesson accu- 
rately learned, every social function properly en- 



ADOLESCENCE 229 

joyed, every bit of manual labor rightly proposed 
and done, every walk and conversation clearly di- 
rected, should be considered as truly a Christian ex- 
ercise, as a prayer, or hymn, or exhortation. All 
these ordinary as well as exceptional experiences are 
truly Christian, however, only in just so far as they 
prepare the personality for truer, higher work all 
the life through, and no farther. Daily life and all 
its duties, as the most direct expression of God in 
the soul, should certainly be the entire object of 
adolescent religion, and this no matter whether the 
immediate " feeling " accompanying this is so satis- 
factory, or not. 

For the adolescent, then, it no longer should suf- 
fice that he be expected to gain from the instruction 
of any one person, or the pursuit of any one line of 
thought, all that he needs for laying foundations for 
future struggles with sin and stress. This is not 
the world of twenty centuries ago. The stresses and 
emergencies of life do not today confine themselves 
within the limits of Eastern intuitions and practices, 
or of Medieval interpretations of these. It takes 
more of physique, more of mind, more of soul, a 
greater mass of personality, in every sense, to keep 
one's hope sure and steadfast, than in those old times 
or in any of the times in which Christian leadership 
has been dominant. Consequent^ what is now pre- 
eminently needed is, that every adolescent shall be 
surely and broadly grounded, not in the means for 
useless controversialism, but in the principles of 
true life and growth ; shall be encouraged to see that 
the God of Bible truth is also the God of scientific 
truth, of moral truth, of literary truth, and of all 



230 HIGHER LIVING 

manner of life-giving sources and helps. Let reli- 
gion come to him as Faith in God, in a continuing 
and perfecting creative energy, not as faith in some 
particular notion of God; as faith in life, not in 
some crystallized conclusion as to its meaning; as 
faith in growth of our knowledge of both God and 
his universe, not in some ignorant and cowardly su- 
perstition which needs to be " defended." A faith 
that is worth while needs no defence from man. It 
affirms and defends itself. How misleading and de- 
structive is the teaching that bases everything on 
forms of faith, rather than on the potent vitality of 
faith, is seen in the numbers who are all at sea in 
respect to such concepts as the " miraculous concep- 
tion," the " divinity of Christ," the " resurrection of 
the body," the " trinity," and the like. Faith in 
these never saved anybody from anything. Faith in 
the life which permeates all good, whether new or old, 
saves everybody, young or old. In this one and true 
faith, every adolescent should be instructed and 
trained so thoroughly, that, no matter what shall 
come to him — grief, loss, pain, degradation, ca- 
lumny — he shall be able courageously to turn his 
face Fatherward and, in the firm trust that inasmuch 
as He can do no wrong, so no essential wrong can 
ever permanently prevail with his children. To him, 
God should be the great Father Arm actuated by the 
sweet Mother Spirit, to whom all may turn, " even 
as little children," not with all sorts of literal befog- 
ments and exaltations of even biblical creatures 
above their Creator, but with open-eyed confidence 
in The Father's stability, good sense and wholesome 
regard for his, for everyone's, crying needs, in the 



ADOLESCENCE 231 

midst of the wilderness of this life. Surely it may 
be unquestionably affirmed and believed that God is 
altogether capable of creating, preserving, and per- 
fecting his universal interests, and that it is man's 
high privilege to try to understand the Creator's 
purpose and methods, and govern his life accord- 
ingly. 

That such a faith may be gained only by the 
proper direction of adolescent religious instincts in 
accordance with the broader and truer understand- 
ing should be seriously considered by every religious 
instructor or persuader is increasingly certain. 
Half the trouble with present-day religious concep- 
tions and practices comes from indefiniteness, both 
as to faith and its contents ; an indefiniteness, too, 
which many of the peculiar kinds of biblical regard 
of the day do not serve to obviate. Today the Bible 
comes very near to being no Bible at all, so far as 
personal vital contact of the masses is concerned; 
while to the more educated reader it often comes as 
such a battleground for all sorts of ghostly revellings 
that he is apt to get tired of it, and take to some- 
thing else. While Matthew Arnold by his inspiring 
books, " God and the Bible," and " Literature and 
Dogma," has restored respect for the Bible to many 
of his kind, it needs another and greater than Arnold 
to bring it back to the private library of ordinary 
readers for more constant and joyous acquaintance. 

Surely, and above all, the home of every adolescent 
should be a spot where instruction and worship, not 
" dutifully," after some prescribed manner, but truly 
and effectively, after the better promptings, shall be 
sustained. How to secure this in this hustling age 



232 HIGHER LIVING 

is somewhat of a question, and will continue to be 
so until we all find out that it is more worth while to 
live than merely to get a living — often so much be- 
yond our needs. Yet, with the idea of the greater 
need and unequalled use kept steadily in mind, home 
worship is even now possible to everyone, at least 
so far as everything essential to spiritual growth is 
concerned. To this end, let the Bible be expurgated 
of all that does not contribute to spiritual edification 
but rather to selfish, cruel and unspiritual practices, 
and then let a selection from the rest be read daily, 
even in the good old-fashioned way. Likewise, let 
the little volume, " Prayers of All Ages," or some 
similar compilation of the best expressions of reli- 
gious aspiration, furnish prayers, which shall be read 
day by day, in turn. These prayers, voicing the 
gratitude and aspirations of the day, must certainly 
realize to everyone who hears them the wholesome in- 
fluence of the very cream of spiritual instruction and 
aspiration and comfort. In addition, when conven- 
ient, and especially on Sunday, let certain of the 
better revelations of the deeper human natures be 
read, over and over, or, better, be committed to mem- 
ory. A recent Christmas present included " Rabbi 
Ben Ezra," by Browning, " The Eternal Goodness," 
by Whittier, " Each and All," by Emerson, and 
" My Legacy," by Helen Hunt. What a goodly 
source of life would such a collection if properly ex- 
tended be, especially if there were added readings 
from inspiring biographies, histories, essays and 
poems. More than all, perhaps, in order to make 
the true spirit of worship abide in the home, every 
meal should be looked upon as a communion service. 



ADOLESCENCE 233 

to be as distinctly in remembrance of the true religion 
as possible — yet not so much by actual conscious 
recognition, as by dearest fellowship and noblest 
realization of this. That such a conception of the 
home table would do away with much of the common 
gossip, slander, triviality, harshness and grossness 
of ordinary meals is beyond question. To doubly 
sanctify all this, let the Heaven-turned heart regu- 
larly listen to something like, " Heavenly Father ! we 
remember all thy goodness, all thy will concerning 
us, our fellowship in the true life, and our constant 
need of the Christ-like spirit " ; and be edified and 
assured accordingly. Surely, the adolescent, edu- 
cated and inspired by such daily faith and reverence 
and devotion in the home, will seldom fail to have at 
least the beginnings of Higher Religious Living so 
fashioned in his mind and heart that he will develop- 
mentally respond to them throughout his entire sub- 
sequent career. 



CHAPTER XIX 
MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 



In morals and social action, as in physics, it is com- 
mon to find that we act under the dominion of a num- 
ber of influences, and submit in our decisions to what the 
physicist calls a resultant of forces. 

S. WEIR MITCHELL 

I contend that we can educate young girls in such mat- 
ters without injuring them mentally or physically in the 
slightest degree. I offer no suggestions that make them 
feel uncomfortable; I let the suggestions and questions 
come from them. Let them ask questions about what- 
ever comes to them, and by answering them in a faith- 
ful, truthful way you can satisfy them without hurting 
them in the least. dr. rachel hickey carr 

Ignorance of evil may sometimes become the active foe 
of innocence. clara morris 

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. 

bible 

But in me lived a sin 
So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, 
Noble, and knightly in me turned and clung 
Round that one sin, until the wholesome flavor 
And poisoning grew together each as each, 
Not to be plucked asunder. 

TENNYSON: " THE HOLY GRAIL " 



CHAPTER XIX 

MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 

It is not unusual for the reading world to be some- 
what seriously reminded of the tendency of modern 
civilization to over-development of masculinity and 
femininity, respectively, even to such an extent that 
the two sexes find themselves on opposite sides of 
a biological and temperamental chasm difficult to 
cross. Certain it is, that in altogether too many 
instances, over-refinement of the feminine nature as 
such, and over-development of the masculine nature 
as such, has reached a degree which renders anything 
like accurate and stable comprehension, one of the 
other, almost impossible. While, of course, no man 
at any time in human history has ever very accu- 
rately comprehended woman's characteristics, or she 
his, it is just as certain, that at no time has there 
ever been a greater need of such comprehension than 
at the present. For it is quite probable that the 
common tendency to emphasize this fundamental dis- 
parity has of itself no little to do with producing 
some of the most serious perplexities that are felt 
to surround the entire sex problem, especially as 
manifest in modern marital and parental relations. 
Certain it is too, that in just this accentuated dis- 
parity may most frequently be discovered some ra- 
tional explanation of so much infelicitous adapta- 
tion, if not of some of the more useful indications for 

237 



238 HIGHER LIVING 

effective remedy. At any rate, it may be best tor 
hold tentatively, that sex and fellowship are by na- 
ture so closely associated that fundamental physical 
or mental or moral disparity, and especially sexual 
disparity, shall always be given exact weight in every 
consideration of social problems, where due regard to 
the importance of the natural dependence of each 
sex upon the other may furnish the only key to their 
solution that is practicable. 

In just what the unendurable and unmanageable 
disparity between the two sexes may consist is a mat- 
ter of somewhat dubious speculation. Some affirm 
that it is essentially physical ; others that it depends 
upon the exceptional development of the essentially 
unreasoning characteristics of the human, especially 
woman's mind ; again, it is said that the whole accen- 
tuated difference is moral, and hence a matter of 
fundamental motive. Probably it belongs to the en- 
tire summation of woman's nature; and, just as 
truly, of man's nature also. The fact is, the whole 
world is growing rapidly in conscious power and 
achievement. It ought to be a congratulatory fact 
that each sex is growing more and more definitely in 
the direction of its own vital purpose and endow- 
ments, even if temporarily this is bound to result in 
more or less infelicitous adjustment in home and so- 
ciety ; for it may be, also, that the additional knowl- 
edge and energy necessary to obviate and remedy this 
will also prove adequate compensation in the end for 
all the present commotion and dubiety. Surely it 
may be believed that whatever danger now impends is 
not beyond the power of a higher experience, either 
individually or collectively, to remedy. 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 239 

In children, consciousness of sexuality is, or ought 
to be, scarcely appreciable. As yet, the bodily 
structures and functions in both boys and girls are 
as nearly generic as certain prophetic differentia- 
tions will allow; a similarity which should be main- 
tained, so far as thought and feeling are concerned, 
until as late a day as possible. Let them be children 
simply in their own childish manner just as long as 
possible, and not get notions of being, or ambitious 
to be, men and women, until actually necessary. 
Precocious physical growth or mentality is bad 
enough; but precocious sexuality is a misfortune, 
and always the result of a mistake if not a crime on 
the part of someone ; and it should be prevented to 
every extent possible. 

Usually, the first impression concerning sexual 
differences is vivid; then, often, in the currents of 
ordinary life there naturally arise frequent enough 
repetitions of similar ones to emphasize this. Added 
to this, the usual custom of repressing curiosity and 
of denying accurate knowledge, while carelessly stim- 
ulating illegitimate knowledge by all sorts of sug- 
gestive innuendo, serves to keep up a psychical ten- 
sion that necessarily leads to a permanency of atti- 
tude and preoccupation which in no sense is helpful 
or good. In this way, an insistent idea of sexuality 
is often allowed or even forced to develop in the 
young mind, which interferes with every subsequent 
attempt to learn legitimate things, or to grow natu- 
rally, during the subsequent phases of physical and 
moral development. Scarcely anything is more com- 
mon than the complaints of youth and young adults, 
that whenever they make attempts to attend fixedly 



240 HIGHER LIVING 

to some lesson or duty or privilege, there interferes 
such a vivid idea of insistent sexuality that the mat- 
ter in hand cannot be successfully grappled with. 
Often, especially in those who are temperamentally 
predisposed, the frequent recurrence of this experi- 
ence leads in the end, if not to vice, then to invaliding 
depression and inefficiency that is most discourag- 
ing. Moreover, in almost all such cases, there is a 
definite history of untoward shock, repetition, or ten- 
sion, or of all combined, to which the trouble may in 
part be referred — a history which very often might 
have been and should have been prevented at the 
start. To avoid this altogether unhappy event, 
everything about the person of children, — their 
clothing, conduct, conversation and opportunities for 
social contact, — should be strictly managed so as 
not to emphasize any possible anticipation of later 
sexual differences. Some of the most serious crimes 
against childhood are the so common, ignorant and 
regardless customs, which serve precociously to make 
prominent in consciousness that which all science 
shows had better be kept in abeyance as long as pos- 
sible. These include many of the children " fads " 
of the day — the parties, the dances, the societies 
and " services," the vanities of every kind — all of 
which have been allowed to arise without due regard 
to their probable influence in developing an exagger- 
ated or morbid sex-consciousness, and in the laying 
of foundations for uncontrollable misery later on. 
Nor should the influence of the moving picture in this 
respect be so disregarded as it commonly is. Noth- 
ing could be worse than so many of the suggestive 
scenes that are calculated to stimulate sex curiosity 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 241 

and impulse, without legitimately gratifying them. 
Parents should be ever alert, critical, and protective, 
here ; and persistently so. 

So, likewise, does emphatic importance attach to 
all the expectations from which there result men that 
are too " manly " and women that are too " wom- 
anly," or the reverse, ever to be capable of perma- 
nent fellowship, later on. Often the man with an 
exaggerated or belittled sense of " manliness " does 
not find the woman with a corresponding sense of 
" womanliness " to meet him half way in the stresses 
and struggles of home, business and society. He too 
often tumbles down or wanders in perplexity, or, for 
awhile, bunglingly tries to adapt himself to the sit- 
uation ; but, in time, he is sure to outgrow it all, and 
to come to shrink from and hate it all ; and then, 
trouble of a serious nature impends, and this is not 
likely to be easily prevented. Or, the sex-perverted 
woman, pitted against the similarly perverted man, 
may first become offended, then hurt, then repelled, 
and finally permanently disgusted, beyond ameliora- 
tion. In either case the situation is both supremely 
painful and dangerous, and obviously needs provid- 
ing against from babyhood on. 

It certainly were better by far to avoid this if only 
partially, as is more likely to be possible. While it 
should be understood that " manliness " and " woman- 
liness " of themselves are neither good nor evil, let it 
be remembered that the real problem is simply and 
entirely, how can men and women live together and 
serve their day and be reasonably happy and pros- 
perous. In this respect, over-development, either of 
the one or the other, is quite as dangerous as is un- 



M2 HIGHER LIVING 

der-development. The remedy, undoubtedly, is a 
well developed, well bred individual, who has been 
thoroughly instructed and trained from babyhood 
on, and in every needful and safe way. Short of 
this, or beyond it, lie danger and distress. 

Especially does this become important as the 
period of puberty and adolescence, so full of rapid 
and profound changes, is approached. Many have 
tried to describe the differences between childhood 
and youth, in this respect, but have only partially 
succeeded, because of certain inherent difficulties, 
both individual and social. 

With the child, broadly speaking, everything and 
everybody is felt emphatically to be for self, and 
this, without much regard for anyone or anything 
else. Nor is this self-feeling other than such as 
naturally comes with almost exclusive self-gratifica- 
tion. If others are hurt by the way, they may be 
given an interested glance, but, curiosity satisfied, 
the child passes on to other sources of interest. 
Even its own pains and sorrows scarcely awaken as 
a rule anything like sympathetic appreciation of 
similar states in others. 

With the advent of youthhood, the personal atti- 
tude begins to undergo a marked change. The self, 
while largely retaining its former significance, now 
emerges slowly into view as but a smaller and smaller 
part of the social world, and correspondingly loses its 
absolute interest and consequently its predominance. 
Although much enlarged by the flood of revelations 
and insights and previsions which are hourly experi- 
enced, the youthful personality must always look 
upon itself alongside of other personalities, and 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS MS 

make more or less interesting comparisons, both 
material and dynamic. From this point on, other 
selves soon have to be taken into account, perforce 
of natural development. This, the rise and growth 
of the social consciousness, is the noteworthy men- 
tal and moral advance that is characteristic of what 
is technically called " puberty." Around this all 
things must henceforth cluster more and more, and 
by this be toned and molded. 

Central to this change of attitude, and perhaps 
more than all else affecting the development of the 
individual, is the rise of the distinctive susceptibility 
to the personal influence of the opposite sex, and the 
very definite series of physiological reactions inci- 
dent thereto. 

Perhaps no single phase of human development 
is ever more significant than this. Awakened by 
the development of certain physically instituted 
means of response, the whole personality becomes 
extra-sensitized, and correspondingly suggestible to 
new orders of impressions. And what so penetra- 
tive, so potent, so exhilarating, so exclusive, as this 
primary consciousness of sex presence and attrac- 
tiveness ; and what so far-reaching in the future de- 
velopment of thought and feeling, as the copy thus 
set in the now so plastic sensibility ! All the springs 
of being respond to it with a dramatic luxury and 
force hitherto unknown. Immediately everything, 
from the heart-beat and the facial blood tides to the 
most exquisite foretokenings of satisfactory com- 
panionship, pulses into consciousness, and fascinates 
beyond natural resistance. But this accentuated re- 
sponsiveness and the accompanying fascination, be- 



244 HIGHER LIVING 

ing both natural and eventually necessary for the 
perpetuation of the species, should neither be igno- 
rantly neglected, maligned, nor thoughtlessly be- 
littled. Nor should the subject when first experienc- 
ing these be allowed on the other hand ever to be- 
come too conscious of their presence, in any way. 
Nor should certain other awakenings ever be al- 
lowed to become overemphasized. For it is equally 
natural that these other awakenings will surely come 
at this time either to frighten, or disgust, or annoy, 
or endanger, or else to do all these in turn; but it 
should not even be possible for certain other people 
who are themselves perhaps overconscious, to dwell 
upon these matters abnormally and to no good pur- 
pose. In either case, the right habit of wholesome 
reaction both mentally and physically should be 
carefully instituted and cultivated. Generally 
speaking, young people are all too frequently left to 
note all these physical and psychological changes for 
and by themselves, and to interpret their significance 
in such ways only as may be determined by predis- 
position and experience, or else by the help of irre- 
sponsible informants, which surely is no safer. It 
is just here that parents and educators make those 
mistakes of omission, which can seldom if ever be 
recovered from. While remembering, if so vaguely 
yet so painfully, their own youthful perplexities and 
fears and conflicts, and perhaps still suffering from 
some of the worst consequences of the haphazard 
methods of management of these mistakes that were 
formerly as now in vogue ; still it does not very often 
appear that this leads them even to attempt to get 
at the real difficulties of the succeeding generations, 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 245 

or to improve very much upon what was done for 
themselves, in their management of them. The fact 
is, they as well as everyone else, are still under the 
bondage of certain moral and social conventionali- 
ties, which effectually forbid anything really worth 
while being done in the great majority of instances. 
Yet, how great the need of the right thing being 
done, how great the useless suffering because of this 
cowardly or silly neglect, how great the interference 
with ultimate adult growth and efficiency, because 
of this ! 

Evidently there is pressing and undeniable need of 
affording every youth such a definite knowledge of 
the exact facts respecting his new and changing im- 
pulses and ideas, and such a wholesome comprehen- 
sion of the experience implied by these, as will most 
certainly make the best possible preparation for 
both the present and the future of his natural life. 
Certain of these facts the } r outh must always sus- 
pect, if not realize. Certain inferences regarding 
these facts he is sure to draw. Certain explanations 
and opinions that impress him profoundly he is 
equally sure to get, even though it be from irre- 
sponsible and unintelligent, or wrongly intelligent, 
sources. Often, all he knows as to fact or conclu- 
sion has been afforded him by chance companions, 
who are just as curious and ignorant, to say noth- 
ing of being possibly more inclined to be vicious, 
than himself. At best, he is left by himself so much 
to experience such a queerness of feeling, vagueness 
of mind, and disturbance of body, as he has never 
before had, and which seldom if ever ceases until 
either accurate instruction or knowledge from per- 



246 HIGHER LIVING 

sonal experience affords the requisite relief. There 
comes to mind, by way of illustration, the personal 
communication of a college professor of wide reputa- 
tion and unsullied character, who, after being for 
many of his earlier years tantalized by the dominant 
wish to look upon feminine nudity as it naturally is, 
found absolute relief when an opportunity purely 
accidental, that gratified his curiosity concerning 
appearances which before had perhaps only mysteri- 
ously been much hinted at in his presence, and yet so 
little explained, at last presented itself. The fact is, 
the hints, the innuendoes, the stories, the chance ob- 
servations, which go to make up the impressions 
youth ordinarily gets about sex matters, are always 
so exciting of curiosity if not dangerous, that the 
demand is, the absolute imperative is, that all these 
shall be speedily supplemented by accurate knowl- 
edge, given by parents, or, if these are incapable or 
unwilling, then by physicians or other competent in- 
structors, at the proper time and place. In fact, 
not to do this should be regarded as a most repre- 
hensible neglect on the part of everyone who has the 
guardianship of youthful life. 

Undoubtedly the proper time for this instruction 
is in the later stages of childhood ; but if this oppor- 
tunity has been neglected, then, at any time, should 
not only proper instruction be given concerning the 
anatomy and psysiology of the sex nature in gen- 
eral, but especially should the psychology of the 
impulses and tensions arising from these be most 
carefully elucidated to the curious listener. But 
not, however, as in the commoner case, when into 
the child mind certain perfected adult conclusions 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 247 

that may or may not be appropriate are " duti- 
fully " read, and duty is thus supposed to be ful- 
filled forever. Simply because the perhaps well- 
instructed adult finds himself possessed of certain 
definite items of knowledge, has certain definite per- 
sonal biases, and is capable of sufficient self-control, 
is surely no complete reason why he should suppose 
the average youth of either sex to be equally so, or 
capable of accurately comprehending what he would 
elucidate or direct. Nor because, on the other hand, 
certain theorists have associated the sexual func- 
tion with religion and ethics in most indissoluble 
significance, is there any sufficient reason why youth 
should not be taught too emphatically that the whole 
law and gospel of their lives may hinge on the atti- 
tude which they shall promptly learn to take to- 
wards these functions. However, it is certain that 
all instruction that is responsibly given is better than 
the common course — a course that has resulted in 
the present morbid wide-spread if not profound over- 
throw of feeling and thought, sometimes out of all 
proportion to the real significance of true sexuality. 
The fact is, almost everyone's mind now is apt to be 
more or less morbid or mawkish, simply because there 
have been generations of repression and semi-erotic 
discussion, alternating with reckless, illegitimate re- 
lief ; and yet seldom if ever any proper or timely in- 
struction at all, as called for by the simple facts ; — 
a course which has naturally resulted in a most seri- 
ous perversion, and vulgarization, and profanation, 
of this most natural, and also most divine, func- 
tion. The time has come and none too soon, for sci- 
ence to step in and say, " Stop trifling with this vital 



248 HIGHER LIVING 

function, and remedy your morbidity and mawkish- 
ness at once ! " Instead of keeping up the silly ta- 
boo of this important subject, it should say, " Bend 
your energies to learning its actual conditions and 
laws, and to giving the growing world the benefit of 
such accurate knowledge," and this without fear or 
favor, or any other morbid consciousness. 

For, when one is forced fully to understand the 
real bearing of ignorant curiosity upon the early 
vice and moral defection of so many, as, for instance, 
the physician is forced to understand it, one is 
constrained to believe that here is a distinctive field 
of the higher imperative, which should henceforth 
be carefully investigated and as fully provided for. 
If parent and guardian and public educator now 
stand appalled at the demand of this imperative and 
the consequences that may accrue from bunglingly 
interpreting and meeting it, let them be sustained 
nevertheless by the consciousness that, in properly 
undertaking and dealing with this aspect of youth- 
ful development, they are undertaking one of the 
most vitally important works that may fall to their 
hands, one that is worth all their possible painstak- 
ing or suffering. The fact is, Higher Living is so 
handicapped and effectually hindered everywhere by 
the perversions and arrests of development originat- 
ing at this time of life, that it is meet indeed that all 
who believe in it, should awake to the splendid op- 
portunities for furthering its progress by careful 
attention to this particular field. 

Probably then, very much can usually and per- 
haps always be done towards preventing the rise and 
development of precocious or perverted sexuality, by 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 249 

proper instruction at the right moment, which un- 
doubtedly comes at different ages in different chil- 
dren. The subject in general is sure to be suggested 
to every child by the numerous unavoidable observa- 
tions and hearsays of almost every day. The com- 
ing of a new baby in the house, the new brood of 
kittens, or of birds, or of puppies, which is so inter- 
esting; certain allusions to delicate subjects, which 
are so bound to occur in perfectly legitimate con- 
versation or literature — all these are sufficient to 
awaken a curiosity, which would better be properly, 
rather than improperly, satisfied. The conventional 
or other reasons which determine that all these 
things shall be left to be explained and commented 
upon by half-informed companions, or by vicious as- 
sociates who illegitimately indulge themselves in thus 
opening the eyes of the virginal child, rather than 
by parents or other responsible guardians, who have 
first informed themselves as to the best means of 
properly imparting accurate and sufficient instruc- 
tion concerning the sexual functions, and how to do 
this, delicately, it is true, but fearlessly, when the 
time for it seems ripe, should be relegated to the 
Ghost-chamber, where all other folly should go for 
company. If the parent is pure in heart and wise 
in mind no serious difficulty need be apprehended or, 
as a rule, experienced in trying to give the proper 
instruction and inspire the proper emotional atti- 
tude. All the instruction that it is really necessary 
to impart is safely accepted by the normal child, 
simply as are all other bits of current information, 
innocently and even sacredly. If the proper word 
be said, such information can easily be guarded from 



250 HIGHER LIVING 

undue attention or comment on the part of either 
the particular child instructed or his fellows. 
Where, however, the parents themselves are too 
gross, or too ignorant, or too low or vicious, the 
question arises, Should not someone else do this im- 
portant work for them? To which the emphatic 
assurance is, Yes. It ought to be and properly is 
the function of the physician, the clergyman, the 
teacher, the somehow better instructed neighbor to 
do this, both in the best interests of the child and 
of the community. Instead of, as now, clergymen 
mystifying and supernaturalizing such matters, or 
physicians neglecting their obvious duty respecting 
them, or benevolent people thinking it unwise and 
immodest even to speak of them, it should be as- 
sumed that no child ought to be trusted to the lead- 
ership and teachings of ignorance or malicious de- 
sign or left without proper safe-guarding, as soon 
as he is old enough to be properly taught and in- 
spired. 

Indeed, it cannot be too frequently or too forcibly 
said that children should be intrusted only to the 
arms of intelligence and consequent accountability, 
and not at any time to the careless babbling of the 
ignorant, or reckless, or designing irresponsibility, 
which so often inaugurates the course of vicious 
habit-formation that may lead to ultimate deviation 
if not destruction, later on. Again, it should be re- 
peated that one of the most important reasons for 
properly instructing children in regard to sexual 
differentiations and functions is, that it saves them 
both from a long-continued, morbid tension of mind, 
which leaves its indelible mark, and from all possible 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 251 

experimentation, designed to fill out possible mean- 
ings, which is very natural and yet is no less danger- 
ous, notwithstanding. Better by far the easily borne 
knowledge of the facts, than the strained wonder 
as to their actuality or their meaning. For, with 
the terrible force of sexual passion urging to culmi- 
nation of some sort, and with no proper knowledge 
of its meaning, its sacredness, or its management, 
what wonder that the indifferent license of the sav- 
age so frequently becomes the emphatic perverter 
and destroyer of civilization? Yet nearly all chil- 
dren can be worthily inspired concerning its con- 
servation both ethically and spiritually, as well as 
physically, and also concerning its application to 
the interests of themselves as well as those of the 
race, — an inspiration which, generally speaking, 
will go the farthest of all toward saving them. 

To just what extent specific instruction is to be 
given, however, and how, is often a puzzle, even to 
those who feel most truly and deeply on the subject 
and are best qualified to give it. By way of helpful 
illustration, suppose we let the little girl, for in- 
stance, be told simply that in order some day to be 
a beautiful woman and be loved by the chosen one 
of her dreams, and even more particularly to be the 
mother of beautiful children, she must be very care- 
ful not to brood over the suggestions of other people 
about these matters or to talk to anyone or allow 
anyone to talk to her except mother, and especially 
allow herself to believe what others say, without first 
ascertaining if it be true ; and then clinch this by 
clearly and repeatedly affirming that if she heeds 
this, she will not fail in after life to realize all that 



252 HIGHER LIVING 

maternal love can possibly bring to her. Every nor- 
mal little girl can understand this, and her interest 
in her dolls as well as in the babies that may chance 
to be within her knowledge, will thus be naturally 
and permanently transferred to her own future pos- 
sibilities in a most legitimate and saving way. And 
so with the developing boy ; he can always be easily 
enough told that, if he wishes to grow to be strong 
and capable as a man and fully able to hold his own 
in the race of life, he, too, must be very careful in 
just a similar manner to talk with father about these 
matters rather than with anyone else, and only to 
believe what is true and wholesome. Beauty of de- 
velopment for young girls, and strength and endur- 
ance for young boys, constitute the natural, and 
consequently the most forceful, incentives to right 
thinking and right acting in this respect. Much 
more truly and usefully so in every way, than do the 
stilted moral and spiritual incentives so often incul- 
cated, which children can neither comprehend aright 
nor find convincing confirmation of in the thought 
and conduct of others. 

In order, however, to make even the best incentives 
effectual, there is a more crying need still, namely, 
that children, especially when younger, shall be kept 
very much closer to their parents than now, and, too, 
as long as possible — that is, if the parents them- 
selves are fit companions for their own children. 
The too common practice of parental desertion as 
soon as children are supposed to be able to take care 
of themselves, is clearly and fully reprehensible; for 
children, no matter how premature, seemingly, are 
never, in this dangerous connection, to be consid- 



MANLINESS AND WOMANLINESS 253 

ered able to take proper care of themselves, so long 
as they remain children or youths and have not be- 
come adults. They are still so irregularly devel- 
oped, so unstable and unbalanced in many directions, 
that they need at every step of this peculiar growth 
the oversight, wisdom, protection, guidance and com- 
panionship of older people, — of those only more- 
over who can assume responsibility and rightly ful- 
fill it for them, and yet not obliterate the child-per- 
sonality as such. Hence the dividing of families into 
older and younger sections, the division of society 
into parental and child groups, the relegation of 
children to special Sunday-school and day-school 
groups, and especially the trusting of them to dis- 
tinctive social functions, is certainly not the natural 
way of helping them to become properly balanced 
men and women later on, as many an individual adult 
could affirm beyond question. 

Yes, let families, even at the cost of much sacrifice, 
keep together, go together, work together, learn to- 
gether, play together, as much as possible; let the 
older youth and younger children be brought up 
together; let society, and church, and state see to it 
that all grading shall be inclusive of these very 
people who ought to be kept together, instead of be- 
ing arranged according to some plan dictated chiefly 
by adult convenience, or comfort, or economy. I 
am sure that in this sensible way, and this only per- 
haps, can this one most serious factor of child un- 
nurture and neglect be effectually prevented, to the 
everlasting profit and eventual comfort of all con- 
cerned. Nor should we forget that not only children 
need such a mixed companionship, but so do adults, 



254 HIGHER LIVING 

none the less. For, only as the latter really learn 
all the characteristics of universal youthhood and 
so become able to appreciate its eternal as well as its 
temporary significance, are they themselves likely 
ever to grow into that purity of conduct and lan- 
guage and thought, which best conserves both indi- 
vidual and social interest. 



CHAPTER XX 
THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 



That this precious couple may never suffer example to 
sway them from a line of conduct in every respect which 
clear impression on their minds decide to be right for 
them, is, and has oft been, the fervent wish of 

THEIR GRANDFATHER, JAMES MOTT 

I hope your marriage will not make you idle; happi- 
ness, I fear, is not good for work. 

DARWIN TO HUXLEY 

To love unsatisfied the world is mystery, a mystery 
which love satisfied seems to comprehend. The latter 
is wrong only because it cannot be content without think- 
ing itself right. f. h. bradley 

I will tell you, dearest, your good is my good, and 
your will mine; if you are convinced that your good 
would be promoted by our remaining as we are for 
twenty years instead of one I should endeavor to submit 
to the end. Robert browning 

If thou workest at that which is before thee, following 
right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allow- 
ing anything to distract thee, but keeping the divine part 
pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give back immedi- 
ately ; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, but sat- 
isfied with thy present activity according to nature, and 
with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou 
utterest, thou wilt live happy. marcus aurelius 

Do not drop back into a too prevalent sentimentalism 
over this matter. Nothing but the courageous self- 
abandon of the highest disinterestedness that seeks to 
do a kindly thing for the j oy it gives to another, that the 
world, God's world and our home, may be made the bet- 
ter thereby, has in it this redeeming power. 

JENKIN LLOYD JONES 



CHAPTER XX 
THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 

Higher Living has always called for righteous con- 
trol of the natural instincts. Chastity has every- 
where been so closely allied to this that the two have 
often been regarded as essentially synonymous. To 
this end, avoidance of the temptation which comes 
through social contact has heretofore been consid- 
ered especially worthy. The monastery, the nun- 
nery, the anchorite's cell, the technical setting apart 
to celibacy, the voluntary renunciant in varied man- 
ner, have marked the spread of all the world's great 
reforms. Even now there are many who feel them- 
selves degraded if not hopeless because they cannot 
absolutely stay the sensual tides of their human na- 
ture, in spite of every sort of attempt both actual 
and figurative to attain to some elevation where the 
peace of the unprovoked shall forever abound. 

But the time is at hand when another and better 
founded notion of chastity may prevail. This no- 
tion is derived from the fact that man in all his 
highest, purest aspirations and efforts may do his 
very best, not when alone, but when in society. This 
fact includes the recognition that the better way to 
be " alone with God " is to be thoroughly social, in 
the midst of as many of His children as practicable. 
Slowly it is coming to light that humanity in its 
aggregate, rather than any particular individual by 

257 



258 HIGHER LIVING 

himself, fully presents the face in which the Spirit 
of God is clearly to be seen. To look upon this face 
with eyes rightly informed and trained, is to see the 
Light in the world which is ever striving to be mani- 
fest. And this light, shining forth upon the be- 
holder, not only reveals the divinity of its own source, 
but divinely vitalizes him upon whom it falls. 

This higher regard for humanity when conscious 
in the individual woman or man constitutes the real 
safeguard that chastity has always so assiduously 
been seeking. Woman's safety and man's safety 
alike depend absolutely upon this higher regard, and 
this alone. So long as either man or woman is looked 
upon as legitimate prey for sentimentalism, or selfish- 
ness, or cruel recklessness, no one is or can be safe. 
The hope of the world in these respects lies not in use- 
less prohibitory precepts and practices, but in the in- 
vesture of the human body and soul with such a sa- 
credness that, as a matter of course, imposition will 
be inhibited and protection established whenever 
temptation shall present itself. 

One of the most important steps toward the 
realization of this sacred regard for humanity and 
the Higher Living which may accrue from it, can 
be taken in connection with an attempt to change the 
ideas that underlie marriage, and the practices that 
grow out of -these. To regard marriage as an in- 
stitution for the gratification of certain adult per- 
sonal impulses is as natural as it is universal. To 
regard the outcome of marriage in personal grati- 
fication and parental realization to be perfectly 
legitimate, does not in itself necessarily imply wrong 
of any sort, except that the higher fulfillment is thus 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 259 

interfered with at a time when something better is 
possible. The fault with most conceptions of mar- 
riage is to be found in their shallowness and short- 
sightedness, rather than in any fixed or deep motive 
as to either right or wrong. 

Marriage, to be conducive to Higher Living, 
should be properly anticipated and prepared for. 
To look forward to marriage with sensibilities 
chiefly focussed upon individual longings and prefer- 
ences, is but to feed the sensual fires not only of self, 
but of all others in the midst. With such, conversa- 
tion, action, everything conduces to generate an at- 
mosphere, the influence of which others must feel if 
they do not always recognize it. In such an atmos- 
phere of spiritual unchastity an unexpected educa- 
tion, subtle but none the less degrading, invariably 
goes on. The young man and young woman, un- 
wittingly influenced by this education, are forever 
correspondingly devitalized and lowered in tone — 
morally always, physically many times. Neither 
one can ever afterwards look upon the other with the 
same clear eye, the same true heart, or the same 
pure thought, which should be the unimpeached right 
of those who are to live together in fullness of 
realization. 

Marriage itself should be considered a holy alli- 
ance, but only when founded on real conditions, and 
not on mere speculations or sentimentalities. It 
cannot be thus considered, however, so long as the 
present fundamental ideas as to its purposes and 
possibilities prevail. Holiness to be holiness, espe- 
cially in all close alliances, must regard others at 
least equally with ourselves — must alwa} T s think of 



£60 HIGHER LIVING 

and for and provide for and protect the weaker 
more unstable party, whenever needed. As it is, 
people marry with no evident or sufficient thought of 
this, whatever. They simply ask, Shall we be satis- 
fied ourselves? and do not ask, Will the little weak- 
ling that may come to our arms be properly par- 
ented, at least within reasonable expectations? Yet 
the whole ethical significance of marriage, the possi- 
bility of its contributing to Higher Living, may be 
seriously jeopardized just here. No more pathetic 
sight, no more cruel retribution, ever comes to pass, 
than when parents realize that their progeny were 
not begotten in love but in lust or disease; not in 
primary regard for the rights of the unformed off- 
spring, but indifferently, or worse. Then it is that 
the hideous fallacy underlying the present notions of 
marriage is revealed. Then it is that one is forced 
to pray that, before many generations shall have 
come and gone, the prospective child and its needs 
and possibilities shall constitute the first and chief 
basis upon which the marriage contract shall be 
founded. Love then will mean something more than 
passion in its usual sense; passion itself will be 
recognized as the sacred inspiration to all that 
leads to the best realizable procreative integrity ; and 
parental realization will not admit of trifling or de- 
sertion, simply because of personal disaffection. 

Said the " Mistress of the Glen " to Henry Van 
Dyke : " And you will remember that love is not 
getting but giving ; not a dream of wild pleasure and 
a madness of desire. Oh, no. Love is not that. It 
is goodness, and honor, and peace, and pure living 
in the world ; yes, love is that ; and the best thing in 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 261 

the world; and the thing that lives longest." And 
Mrs. Browning, in her " Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese," sings equally clear of those " who love 
through all this world of ours," whether overgrown 
with " eglantine and ivy," or with " bitter weeds " 
and " rue." 

Nor need this notion of love, and the allied notion 
of marriage primarily for the child's sake, be allowed 
to destroy interest in the warmer sentiment, at all. 
Indeed it may be believed that it is, and will continue 
to be, just those persons who entertain these higher 
and truer notions that will best be able to prove 
that the love and marriage which affords personal 
satisfaction, and afterward ripens into a life-long 
friendship, is that which will turn out to be the most 
satisfactory and permanent, in the end. Indeed 
marriage thus instituted, for what Walter Pater 
quotes from the Old Cyrenaics, " As life for life's 
sake," must naturally predetermine the permanent 
adaptation of all such intelligent as well as instinc- 
tive participants to the accomplishment of thor- 
oughly vitalized results, and so to the realization of 
every legitimate expectation. 

Moreover, it is worthy of serious consideration, 
that, if the energy that is now wasted in disappoint- 
ment and separations and in caring for crippled and 
undeveloped lives, could once be given to inculcating 
the truer point of view, and in living up to it, " in- 
felicity " and " incompatibility " and hateful ignom- 
iny and degradation would be founded much less 
frequently than now, and Higher Living would re- 
ceive an impetus such as has seldom been noted. 

So it seems entirely justifiable to say that, what- 



262 HIGHER LIVING 

ever may be the conclusion of thoughtful people in 
respect of the need of changing the point of view 
from which marriage shall henceforth be regarded, 
there is little room for serious question in respect of 
the wretched outcome of the ideas and practices that 
mostly prevail at the present time. If one doubts 
this, let him carefully study the intimate history of 
even a few families for three successive generations, 
and note the enlightening influence of this investi- 
gation upon his own convictions. A few years ago 
such a study was actually made of a few families, 
and the results used, in part, for technical purposes. 
Since then, there has been no hesitancy in affirming 
that the importance of all other proposed reforms 
and readjustments of society does not equal the one 
that shall eventually determine that better knowl- 
edge, purer motives and more wholesome acquaint- 
ance before marriage, shall be made radically to 
supplant the widespread ignorance, selfishness and 
even gross recklessness, which now so commonly pre- 
vail, and so frequently predestinate to ultimate pain 
and failure. 

If we pursue our studies with respect to the actual 
facts, rather than with respect to our theories and 
personal demands, we soon come upon some rather 
startling disclosures. Thus, suppose we instance 
the experience of a certain two little baby-faces, 
who were about as well endowed for marriage and 
parenthood as dolls, and yet who " fell in love," and 
were of course duly married by some good but blind 
authority. As it was, one came from a progres- 
sively developmental stock, and so was predestined to 
grow steadily throughout the whole of life, and actu- 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 263 

ally did thus mature. The other, being from non- 
developmental stock, very soon stagnated. For a 
time indulgence, then honor, kept them together; 
but later there came repeated misunderstandings, 
then persistent tension and distress, then loosening 
of the marital bonds, and finally dishonor and degra- 
dation sufficient to snap them in twain; while misery 
" too deep for tears " settled like a pall over both. 
With such an instance in mind are we not almost 
justified in saying, with Thackeray, that " all early 
love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like 
so many blind kittens " ; or, if not this, then shall we 
say more justly, that something more than the mere 
inclination of two such children should be required 
as the determining influence, where so much that is 
of the highest significance is at stake? Many will 
remember a certain characterization of Emerson's : 
" Gertrude is enamored of Guy," says he. " How 
high, how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and 
manners. To live with such a man were life indeed 
and no purchase too great; and heaven and earth 
are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy. 
But what now avails how high, how aristocratic, how 
Roman his mien and manners if his heart and aims 
are in the senate, in the theater, and in the billiard 
room, and she has no aims, no conversation that can 
enchant her graceful lord?" "I suppose," says 
Mr. W. D. Howells, " it is always a little shocking 
and grievous to a wife when she recognizes a rival in 
butcher's meat and the vegetables of the season," or 
perhaps more frequently we may add, in a cigar and 
newspaper in the den or at the club. 

Take again the instance where a greedy, sensual 



264 HIGHER LIVING 

boor looks upon the face of refinement and intellec- 
tuality, and straightway proceeds to fascinate and 
finally to capture one, who, in the bonds he subse- 
quently forges, cannot but suffer such revolting 
degradation and pain that forever after a consum- 
ing fire would be comfortable in comparison. Yet 
such an one is commonly justified as to his course, 
on the ground of his ostentatious and devoted 
" love." Or, note where a true-souled, trusting, 
noble, aspiring man takes to his heart a shallow, 
selfish, wrongly-schooled woman, one who not only 
finds no satisfaction in marriage for her own rest- 
less self, but who breath by breath chokes the very 
life out of her partner, as well. Or, again, note 
the facts accurately where an ambitious, bright, 
capable, progressive woman becomes yoked to a self- 
satisfied, self-indulgent semblance of a man. Of 
course the latter is " satisfactorily fixed," as he ex- 
ultingly believes and as other men say; for let him 
work or play, be sick or well, rich or poor, his higher- 
minded wife is sure to make things go, and he is 
equally sure to reap his ungleaned benefits as unfail- 
ingly. Nevertheless, one may see lines of hopeless 
illness wearing deeper and deeper on the poor wife's 
face as she bravely does all this, until one often won- 
ders how she is able to persevere so long in such a 
bondage to. blatant egotism and cruel inertia. Or, 
look at another instance, in which Idealizing Hope 
takes self-deluding, fascinating Wild-Oats to her 
heart and finds herself dragged down, down, little by 
little but none the less surely, and with no hand at 
any point to stay her course! Again and again a 
physical giant marries a highly sensitized pigmy; a 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 265 

rake engulfs purity; a brute hypnotizes a lady. 
Here only the family physician can really know what 
hard work is needed simply to prolong such lives, to 
say nothing of trying to alleviate distress, unnam- 
able and incurable. " Pompilia " is sold outright 
to her princely hand-and-f ortune-seeker, and no won- 
der that afterwards she spoke of her experience as 
" a living death." " Dorothea Brooke " attempts 
to be the companion of pseudo-literary but impotent 
" Casaubon " ; her failure is at last clearly enough 
revealed in the recorded fact that she has kept the 
prize of her heart intact for " Will Ladislaw." 
" Gwendolen Harleth " sells herself to " Sir Grand- 
court," and upon a time the rope just fails to reach 
the sinking husband when it might have saved him 
from the deep waters. Old " Roger Chillingworth " 
tries to adapt himself to the youthful instincts of 
" Hester Prynne " ; and " Arthur Dimmesdale " con- 
sequently wears the " Scarlet Letter," because of a 
most natural sympathy, and worse ; " Becky 
Sharpe " ogles and captures " Rawdon Crawley," 
"Tannhauser" cloys of " Holda," "Helen" runs 
off with "Paris," " Gunther " will marry " Brun- 
hilde " despite " Siegfried's " warning ; and, some- 
way, as we read of these, all the older and most uni- 
versal story and legend do not seem so very far re- 
moved from the commonplace history of our own 
times. Indeed, are not all these " Modern In- 
stances," if you will, sadly typical of everyday 
events ? 

Then, again, we must not forget the instances 
where degeneration laps itself on the knees of whole- 
someness, and the stream of tendency becomes dan- 



266 HIGHER LIVING 

gerously muddied in consequence, with all the ter- 
rible defect and deformity which so often disappoint 
parental anticipation! Or, where education seeks 
companionship at the fireside of illiteracy, or religion 
and scoffing sit thrice daily opposite at table. What 
wonder that so often a third party comes on the 
scene of such " incompatibles " to add to the confu- 
sion, or worse, to incite to vice and crime! Some 
men want what Charles Lamb calls " furniture 
wives," others, a mother or nurse. Some women 
marry for a home or for money, and others, out of 
spite; and many, many just marry, and none, includ- 
ing themselves, ever fully know why their subsequent 
lives are spent in inevitable discomfort. Foolish 
man rushes on where he thinks he sees an angel only, 
and finds, later, that he was inexcusably deluded ; 
blinded woman prinks herself almost to the exclu- 
sion of every decent limit, and is sure her Adonis 
must be the only god ; to find herself nevertheless 
deserted in her extremity, with none to lament. " So 
nature always evens up and avenges herself in her 
own way ! " Says one of the characters in James 
Lane Allen's book, " The Choir Invisible " ; " Some 
women in marrying demand all and give all." Says 
the wise " Mrs. Falconer," in the same book: " with 
good men they are happy, with base men they are 
broken hearted. Some demand everything and give 
little; with weak men they are tyrants, with strong 
men they are divorced. Some demand little and give 
all ; with congenial souls they are already in heaven, 
with uncongenial they are soon in their graves. 
Some give little and demand little; they are the 
heartless, and they bring neither the joy of life nor 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 267 

the peace of death." And, it may be added, this is 
not more true of women than it has been or is fast 
becoming true of men, to the everlasting sorrow of 
both. Strictly speaking, do not all such marriages 
and their like, truly w wild " as they are, almost 
necessarily conduce to recklessness, self-indulgence, 
bestialization, solubility, misery unspeakable, and 
even to shortened days? At best, they scarcely 
more than approach the sacred standard of genuine 
marriage, while all too often they but simply falsify 
and degrade and blight the whole idea of marriage as 
it should be. Meanwhile, Ibsen's " Ghosts " hover 
about them with an uncanniness that strikes horror 
to everyone of clear vision and intellectual compre- 
hension. Taking things as they go, then, what can 
sensibly be expected other than that many of these 
marriages shall necessarily result, not alone in dis- 
appointment, but in actual nervous or mental or even 
physical disease — in the awful destructive pain and 
yielding that heaven itself can scarcely heal; or, 
that the children of such mismatings shall necessarily 
bear the marks of that to which they have thus been 
predestined, and so be, as in fact they are, too often 
degenerate, full of pain and inefficiency, and capable 
only of perpetuating possibilities of the most dis- 
couraging sort! 

Evidently, after such studies as these, there seems 
to be but one tenable conclusion for the elite intelli- 
gent mind of today to assure itself of, namely, that 
marriage as it is, is all too often a failure just be- 
cause presumption and inertia and selfish considera- 
tions so chiefly hold sway, and that consequently the 
imperative demand should now and henceforth be, 



268 HIGHER LIVING 

that so important a step be no longer left to the mere 
whim of dreaming ignorance, or, as Nerissa ex- 
plained to Portia, left to go, like hanging, " by des- 
tiny " ; but that it should as soon as possible be pre- 
pared for in every way that experience and scientific 
investigation suggests, and nevermore be allowed to 
become so serious a hindrance to happiness and pros- 
perity as it conspicuously is at the present time. 

In order then that marriage may reasonably be 
prophetic of success, it must be intelligently and de- 
votedly safeguarded from generation to generation, 
by the discovery and subsequent recognition and in- 
genious application of certain necessary yet intelli- 
gible conditions, outside the bearing of which, it may 
be confidently supposed people cannot safely entrust 
themselves. Remembering that the marriage rela- 
tionship is always so close and continuous and so 
mutually impressive, that each party must gradually 
yield more or less to the influence of the other's per- 
sonality, it follows plainly that these limits, so far 
as known, or so far as future investigation may dis- 
close them, should come as thoroughly to be re- 
spected, save perhaps in a very few exceptional cases, 
as in the case of any other natural limitation known. 
Nor is the vital importance of this law of mutual in- 
fluence weakened by the fact that, as yet, its direc- 
tion and scope have not been fully or definitely ascer- 
tained. Unfortunately there never yet has been the 
accurate and methodical observation and record of 
people's lives for successive generations that growing 
intelligence will some day demand for this very pur- 
pose. Still, somewhat attentive study of the sub- 
ject for many years has brought to light evidence 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 269 

that goes to show, that there actually is such a mu- 
tual influence, and that where the law governing this 
influence is properly heeded, it proves to be a safer 
course by far, than any sort of yielding to blind 
assurance or chance-taking. 

The closer we study the facts and operations of 
this vital influence, the clearer becomes the convic- 
tion that in the first and most obvious place, people 
with certain diseases, or with marked tendencies to 
certain kinds of disease, should not marry, no matter 
what the personal inclination may be. Already the 
statute law forbids this in some cases, and it will not 
be many decades before legal prohibition will be ex- 
tended to all others that physically or mentally or 
morally are demonstrably unfit to assume and fulfill 
such weighty responsibilities. Especially will this 
hold true in the case of those who either willingly or 
unwillingly have contracted certain specific diseases, 
for which there is as yet no permanent cure known, 
or certain other diseases, that necessarily result in 
those exhausted conditions which are not only incur- 
able, but which certainly jeopardize the health, lon- 
gevity, and happiness of themselves, their compan- 
ions, and especially their progeny. If it be at all 
right to condemn those who would commit homicide 
and suicide, it certainly is quite as right to provide 
against fatally, or even seriously jeopardizing life, 
especially unborn life, either by specific disease or ir- 
revocable exhaustion. Sentiment is here justified 
not by love, but by right. And some day this high 
sense of right will prevail against all opposition as 
well as stupidity. 

Again, it may be profitably affirmed that it is very 



270 HIGHER LIVING 

probable, indeed that it is quite certain, that two 
people contemplating marriage may be so radically 
disproportionate in a physical sense, as seriously to 
endanger the prosperity of the marriage relation, 
from the very first. When this is the case, there is 
not only the probability that very painful and ex- 
hausting physical disease will result, but that a most 
ungovernable divisive, if not destructive, antipathy 
and repugnance will develop, as well. As simply a 
matter of common sense, to say nothing of right rea- 
son, this might seem to be unquestionably probable. 
Wide observation shows that it is actually a fact of 
a most serious order. 

Again, an unhappy marriage is as a rule much 
more probable where there is too great disparity as 
to age. Of course old people somewhat frequently 
marry young ones, and occasionally the outcome 
seems to be satisfactory to both parties. But alto- 
gether more generally than is suspected, it is re- 
vealed that the older party entered into the contract 
with certain anticipations, perhaps based upon ac- 
tual knowledge, which were bound to render the out- 
come to the younger party, often with little or no 
knowledge at all, not very much above a veritable 
imposition. Probably a difference of ten or at most 
fifteen years represents a limit that ought not fre- 
quently to be transcended. And even this disparity 
requires that many extra precautions and much 
extra preparatory intelligence shall always be en- 
listed, lest the disappointment of one or both parties 
shall prove ultimately too deep for repair. 

Common observation reveals likewise the danger 
that often arises from too marked differences as to 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 271 

taste, disposition, ideals, former associations, and 
the like. If the disparity in any one or more of 
these respects is too great or too dissonant for mu- 
tual compromise, something untoward is quite sure 
to result, either to the contracting parties them- 
selves, or to their children, or to all concerned. Of 
course, it is very true that the best things of life 
come only as the result of contrasts, and that in mar- 
riage contrast undoubtedly plays a most important 
part, and frequently for good. But it is seldom if 
ever the contrast that is founded upon too definite 
habits, too special tendencies, too sharp-angled indi- 
vidualities, too conventional differences, and the like, 
that are to be dreaded so much, as that which is 
founded upon the peculiar differences of irreconcila- 
ble personalities. Such personalities, if at all fully 
developed, usually present just the contrasts which 
married life cannot harmonize, and so are bound to 
conduce most to unsatisfactory companionship. On 
the other hand, the trouble frequently arises from 
there not being enough contrast, especially not 
enough of the truly personal contrast that naturally 
belongs to men and women as such and makes them 
mutually attractive and satisfying. 

Nor should there be too definite or too extensive 
dissimilarity in mental capacity or in education and 
discipline. Not that differences in school education 
necessarily or usually constitute the danger line, but 
that certain differences in mental and spiritual ca- 
pacity and in readiness to learn or to respond to nec- 
essary discipline, as well as certain other differences 
in respect of capacity for the kind of observation, 
reading and thinking requisite for progressive 



272 HIGHER LIVING 

growth of mind, are invariably so hard to be patient 
with. If these dispositions and peculiarities do not 
exhibit themselves on a somewhat similar plane as the 
privileges and responsibilities of married life de- 
velop, the party who excels will often tire of the 
companionship of the one who remains stationary or 
falls behind, or the latter will feel the obvious dif- 
ference so painfully that certain envies, jealousies, 
disappointments or other elements of personal and 
marital danger will sooner or later almost necessarily 
supervene. Strong-brained men may claim, before 
they know experimentally, that they prefer gentle, 
domestic, sweet women ; and brainy women may claim 
that they quite prefer the simple role of being vinelike, 
in a prospective experience of forever clinging to one 
man. But practically each may find out, often does 
find out, that lack of companionship along lines of 
mutual comprehension and interest, and especially 
of personal strength of character and sympathy, 
does not furnish a very safe ground for marital per- 
petuity and satisfaction, even where intention is good 
and effort is assiduous ; while it must be said that 
the progeny of such people are often endowed with 
a personality so heterogeneous or so loosely con- 
structed, that they are almost necessarily predes- 
tined to experience unduly the constitutional and 
developmental misery and interference which is nat- 
urally derived from a too profoundly rhythmical 
moodiness. In some of these instances, certain very 
definite alternations in the personality itself, such, 
for instance, as simulate alternately the two parents 
from whom it has sprung, may be noted ; while all 
such children are apt to be in some degree more or 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 273 

less seriously unvitalized, and to develop instabilities 
that are often as dangerous as they are distressing. 1 
Again, it is fairly well demonstrated that some- 
thing similar holds true where differences of opinion 
and practice concerning industrial and economical 
matters are too marked. A person naturally care- 
ful, frugal and industrious, married to a reckless, 
indolent spendthrift, will very probably not realize 
the ideal of married life to a very satisfactory ex- 
tent, try as he will. Nor will a generous heart and 
hand bound to a niggardly skin-flint be likely to do 
much better. Again, an easy-going, open-minded, 
hopeful person tied to a narrow-minded pessimist is 
sure either to degenerate into some sloppy form of 
selfish thinking, or else to realize from every day's 
living too much uneasiness for permanent endurance, 
or possibly both these simultaneously. With refer- 
ence to religious differences, too, there is always a 
question, notwithstanding that many times these 
make little or no trouble. Still, when these differ- 
ences are too marked, and especially when bred from 
early childhood, even though there may be at the 
time of marriage no threatening danger, yet it 
should nevertheless be tolerably certain that either 
the parties are in every other respect exceptionally 
suited to each other, or else that they have been 
brought up in those rare church circles where reli- 
gion as such is happity made to be subordinate to, 
and to exemplify chiefly, the true Christianity ; and 
in which breadth of thought and catholicity of feel- 
ing and conduct are held to be of more importance 

i (See art. Heterogeneous Personality, by Smith Baker, in 
the Jour. Nervous and Mental Diseases for Sept., 1893.) 



274 HIGHER LIVING 

than set beliefs or forms of words ! Indeed, it may be 
laid down as a rule that, other things being equal, 
truly Christian people, no matter how widely apart 
they may be in merely doctrinal variations, may in 
many instances unhesitatingly marry without expect- 
ing subsequent infelicity ; while mere religionists, who 
are so often neither thus wisely instructed nor prop- 
erly disciplined, would much better hesitate, espe- 
cially if denominational and creedal differences are 
at all vital to their egoism or even to their self- 
respect. It seems but little less than providential 
that swirling floods were made to bring " Laura 
Fountain's " life to an end — " this last bitter re- 
source " — before she could place herself where the 
rigid narrowness of " Helbeck of Bannisdale " could 
crush her soul to miserable atoms, or where she could 
be tempted possibly to derelictions beyond recall. 

Paradoxically, there is really such a thing as two 
people loving altogether too intensely for a perma- 
nent marriage to be probable. Such lovers, al- 
though evidently so thoroughly aroused and fasci- 
nated that it is natural for them and all their friends 
to suppose that of all the world they are certainly 
just the ones to marry, and, of course, never to re- 
gret the step, yet but prove somewhat too frequently 
that the future history of even such absolutely cer- 
tain people depends, not so fully upon this primary 
and emphatic passion of soul and body, as upon 
certain other things, which, if not so intensely inter- 
esting at first, become yet quite as absolutely impor- 
tant, and withal quite as interesting, as the years 
go on. Hence it is well to remember that such com- 
monplace things as heredity, temperament, educa- 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 275 

tion, activity, and the like, are of this basic nature; 
and that the question whether the fierce warmth of 
the initial love shall ever become the unmanageable 
bane of ennui or fire of jealousy, or not, is altogether 
too vital to be ignored or wrongly answered. Here 
it would often seem that the expectant tension set up 
by such intense personal feelings is so great, that it 
takes but very little indeed to bring about some sort 
of startling explosion, which, despite every wish or 
expectation otherwise, may prove to be most direful 
in its ultimate results. Hot love may indeed be fol- 
lowed by a paradoxical chill, not only very surpris- 
ing, but frequently too blasting ever to be recovered 
from! 

Nor should this be lost sight of in connection with 
the question of a second marriage. Nothing could 
seem more natural and better legitimated at times 
than for people to enter into the marriage contract 
the second time, and possibly the third. Yet, as one 
recalls many instances where such has been the case, 
one is reminded of the mournful darkie, who, upon 
the burial of his fourth wife, remarked, " Yes, my 
brother, it is very sad, but you know we're in the 
hands of an all-wise and unscrupulous Providence ! " 

Certainly the " providence " that has the order- 
ing of most marriages after the first, does not seem 
to have profited enough by former experience to as- 
sure a much larger proportion of successes here, 
than at first. In any one or more of many ways 
peculiar to themselves do the parties to such mar- 
riages seem to be weighted unfavorably, as well 
as subject to every cause of deflection peculiar to 
the first one. Some of these causes of trouble are 



276 HIGHER LIVING 

more commonly to be observed than others, and some 
require rather special observation to detect them. 
In most cases, however, the results are altogether too 
patent. 

First among the sources of unprosperous mar- 
riage, here as elsewhere, is none other than the un- 
holy motive, the inadequate intelligence, the undisci- 
plined nature, the crude and selfish expectation, and 
the unseemly conduct, to say nothing of the unmiti- 
gable boredom, of those who soon find themselves in 
a trap whose door has no respectable outward swing. 
On the very face of altogether too large a propor- 
tion of second marriages, there are marks of palpable 
fraud from the first. Both parties to these con- 
tracts really looked for more than they expected to 
give, and consequently left nothing undone that fa- 
vored their own project. The man may have been 
the father of children, and really wanted anew wife, 
more however for his own purposes pre-eminently, 
than a mother for them. Or, the woman wanted a 
home, hoped to get rid of the " incumbrances " 
speedily, and be a mistress in truth where her 
predecessor had perhaps been subservient only. 
Neither party said as much before marriage ; neither 
one could refrain from offensively manifesting their 
real motive afterward. To both came much suffer- 
ing in consequence, and as for the children, may God 
help them ! 

Or, there was a rich widow and an impecunious but 
fascinating youngerling, or an older but entirely so- 
phisticated schemer, either of whom played his cards 
skillfully and was pleased to gather his spoils in due 
season. What he did with them in either case be- 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK 277 

came a revelation so painful to the perhaps eager 
but trusting victim, that she found life but a " living 
death " with no grave to protect or rest her. She 
didn't know — he did know, and used his knowledge 
to his own selfish ends, as she realized when too late. 
Then there is the case, a rather common one, where 
a man suffering from a perfect torrent of passional 
eagerness on account of senile sources of irritation, 
out of all proportion to normal functioning at his 
age, buys (there's no other name for the process) a 
woman who is yet but a child, and who little sus- 
pects the physical repugnance that the great dis- 
parity in age and passion may develop in her, and 
proceeds to gratify himself in such lustful ways as 
must necessarily despoil her mind of all sense of 
decent respect, to say nothing of requiting love. 
What a hell on earth is hers eventually, and one that 
refuses to be soothed even by expectation of the 
pecuniary largess that was persuasively promised, 
is not easily described; and Dante overlooked it, I 
believe. Probably there is no insult to woman na- 
ture so insulting as the rabid incompetency of the 
senile degenerate. Few indeed are the exceptional 
instances where January can help being thus a daily 
insult to the June that has been thus led to attempt 
mating with him. 

Generally speaking, then, it seems absolutely re- 
quired that somewhat similar elements of prospec- 
tive health, longevity and general stability of 
thought and feeling on both sides, should be reason- 
ably certain. Frailty, no matter how lovable, is not 
always a reliable assurance of a happy marriage; 
short life leads many not only to sore grief and loss, 



278 HIGHER LIVING 

but often to wretched complications, on the part of 
survivors ; while neither a mono-idea nor a mono- 
feeling on the one hand, nor an unsympathetic effu- 
sion of ideas and feelings on the other, can very 
often be made to constitute the necessary stable 
ground for marital and parental life. Surely noth- 
ing imaginable can possibly be more nagging, or 
more sapping of the very life itself, than, for in- 
stance, where a scatter-brained voluble woman is 
married to one who is thoughtful and quiet; and this 
represents a class that may stand for all such pri- 
mary mismating. If such things or others suggested 
by them seem theoretically not quite sufficient to be 
very dangerous, it yet is a fact that once marriage is 
fulfilled on such conditions, there is likely to fol- 
low and very often does follow, an almost unendur- 
able round of complaint, misunderstanding and feel- 
ing of dissatisfaction that is utterly destructive of 
marital stability; while many a man's or woman's 
health unexpectedly breaks down, many a soul goes 
astray, and many a life becomes ruined, simply be- 
cause these so-called " little things " were not 
thought of and guarded against before the contract 
was entered into. 

Of course even such pointed hints as these should 
be taken always as but indicating the lines upon 
which the prosperity of both parents and progeny 
may more safely be based, rather than as indicating 
something already fully enough understood to be 
absolutely dependable or literally imperative upon 
anyone. Eugenics is a new science, and its laws are 
not yet to be strictly announced. Besides, everyone 
knows there are many happy exceptions to each of 



THE JOYOUS OUTLOOK £79 

the foregoing limitations ; but this should not blind 
the individual or the public to the overshadowing im- 
portance of the many failures, nor should it preclude 
from every possible effort toward making such limit- 
ing suggestions and conditions as comprehensive and 
as accurate and therefore as practical as possible, 
and likewise as widely known and believed in as prac- 
ticable. Hence it will be pre-eminently the task of 
the future social investigator and philosopher, not 
chiefly to dogmatize the conditions of marriage from 
imagined or other subjective premises, but so to 
study the whole subject from every available point 
of view, — physical, mental, ethical, spiritual, eco- 
nomic, — that what is found out will help most genu- 
inely to reform natures that are already fixed in 
married life by many, perhaps unfortunate, years, 
and, what is of greater importance, to pre-form na- 
tures through right marriage and right early en- 
vironment in such a way that change for the better 
will from generation to generation be realized more 
and more on the side that is right. If it be worth 
while to compute to a nicety the expectation of life 
with respect, say, to its bearing upon the mere mone- 
tary cost of insurance, why is it not even more 
sensible and economical and assuring to compute the 
expectation of marriage, especially in respect to its 
bearing upon such vital things as health, longevity, 
progeny, happiness and heaven? Surely, the claims 
of anything like a practical Eugenics not only jus- 
tify this, but encourage universal consideration of it 
to the utmost. 



CHAPTER XXI 
THE WEDDING DAY 



There is a wedding that's just as good as gold, and 
sure to result in a good, true home, and that is when the 
man and woman understand what a good home means, 
are drawn together by the true Providence which still 
makes all true matches, in spite of the maneuverings of 
our prejudice and pride; when they come together in a 
fair equality, not, as the poet sings, as moonlight and 
the sunlight, but as perfect music, unto noble words. 

ROBERT COLLYER. 

What greater thing is there for two human souls than 
to feel that they are j oined for life — to strengthen each 
other in all labor, to rest in each other in all sorrow, to 
minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each 
other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of 
the last parting? george eliot 

And may the gods grant thee thy heart's desire; a 
husband and a home, and a mind at home with his may 
they give — a good gift, for there is nothing mightier 
and nobler than when a man and wife are of one heart 
and mind in a house, a grief to their foes, and to their 
friends great joy; but their own hearts know it best. 

HOMER 

Did a woman ever live who would not give all the 
years of tasteless society for one year, for one month, 
for one hour of the uncalculating delirium of love poured 
out upon a man who returned it? c. D. warner 



CHAPTER XXI 
THE WEDDING DAY 

What royalty of anticipation suffuses the wedding 
day itself, and all that goes immediately before and 
after it! The bright-eyed choices of associates and 
place and celebrant; the eager and flushed devotion 
to every detail of apparel and accessories, the tremu- 
lous queryings as to what will please or best fulfill 
convention; the severing of old intimacies and timid 
substitution of idealized future ones ; the tender 
grasp of hands which, sustaining until the very last, 
must soon be extended to those who are more or 
less strangers, if only for a season ; — all this makes 
impressive the overfull weeks and days that after- 
wards are so often recalled, in sweetest joy, we trust, 
or if possibly in deep sorrow, then with recognition 
of the beneficent discipline and instruction that may 
be too valuable to be regretted entirely ! 

And then, "The Day," itself! Let it be in the 

loveliest June, or bleak winter, in the red and russet 

Autumn, or during the snowy blooms of dynamic 

May ; what matters the time, when at last two hearts 

realize that all the love, the deep sentiment, the 

pleasure of their coursing thoughts since the day 

when " Fate " projected their union, is now really 

theirs and for certain? Surely, at this moment, no 

misgiving as to the present, no possible question as 

to the outcome, has any right, does not dare, to in- 

283 



284 HIGHER LIVING 

trude. Heaven seems to smile its own sweet assur- 
ances, and earthly friends do not doubt that " joy- 
bells " should now ring, never so cheerily, in high 
confirmation of what God is to join forever and ever. 
And to this do all good people breathe " Amen ! " so 
deep, that the Universe itself can only respond 
" Amen ! so let it be ! " Blessed hour of the growing 
love's fulfillment ! Around it let every good in earth 
and heaven so mightily conspire and energize, that 
all its high promises may be realized. 

With the unique significance of the wedding tidal- 
wave in mind, it would seem that nothing less than 
due respect for its significance ought everywhere and 
without question to prevail. In a sense, this is prob- 
ably the case. At least, there is everywhere the no- 
tion that marriage should be celebrated in some such 
way as will make it emphatic, and consequently as 
memorable in the careers and memories of those most 
concerned, as possible. That this notion is the 
source of most of the peculiar wedding customs is 
quite probable. Even the most barbarous customs, 
survivals of which in attenuated aspects are found in 
civilized rituals, naturally serve this purpose. The 
savage's rude capture of a coveted maiden and sub- 
sequent brutal subjugation of her personality, must 
be an emphatic and unforgettable experience in both 
their lives. Even where marriageable children are 
simply bartered by parents, the array of materials 
incident to the exchange is exceptional enough to be 
tremendously impressive. And so with all the rude, 
coarse frolics and feastings of races higher up. By 
all of these customs married couples are made to 
feel that the marriage ceremony is a true preliminary 



THE WEDDING DAY 285 

to the climax of earthly joy for them, and also to 
the climax of earthly experience, as it is henceforth 
to be shared in by family, friends and community. 

Nor do Christian peoples lack adequate means for 
thus making the wedding impressive enough to be re- 
membered. What with exceptional clothes and 
feasts, with presents and plannings, with service and 
ritual, with instruction and blessing, there is cer- 
tainly much goodly prompting to an unusual exalta- 
tion of self, such as undoubtedly points to an ex- 
ceptional remembrance, permanent and glad. That 
the final outcome is often otherwise, shows that some- 
where in the preliminaries or proceedings themselves 
there was serious fault. A Christian marriage is 
and should be an impressive ceremony; if not, then 
are the parties who celebrate it in some respect or 
other out of place. Nor should it be permitted that 
anything should ever vitiate or detract from its 
solemn impressiveness, or be accepted as a more con- 
venient substitute. Extraneous affairs should not 
be allowed to interfere with the fullest comprehen- 
sion of the solemn meaning of what is being under- 
taken. If the true significance of the purpose of 
marriage is only half apprehended at the moment, 
it certainly seems appropriate to affirm that if 
trouble ensues, this fact should not so frequently be 
lost sight of in subsequent attempts to explain or 
justif}' it. 

As to whether the wedding day shall be one of 
simple home ingathering of close friends and rela- 
tives, or of a more public nature, is a question of 
rather more serious import than seems usually to be 
considered. Naturally, parental means, taste, cus- 



286 HIGHER LIVING 

torn, and especially personal ambitions, have much 
to do with the choice. When all is well, and the 
parties concerned are amply able to justify unusual 
expenditure or publicity by subsequent life, it does 
not appear very desirable or even reasonable to offer 
criticism concerning large expenditures, although 
good taste must always protest seriously against 
overdoing this. But, taking people as they are, it 
always seems somewhat risky to undertake flights of 
ambition at this time, to say nothing of indulgences 
in vanity, that obviously outdo everything and every 
possibility that may follow. The spectacle of a 
pretentious and gaudy public wedding, in which the 
contracting parties have little assurance of being 
able to live up to any such standards afterwards, is 
not wholly edifying to people of experience, or to 
those who have the deeper interest in life. That the 
day should have and promise all the happiness pos- 
sible, and that it should be a distinctive milestone in 
the pathway of the two lives most concerned, is true 
beyond peradventure. But that the day should 
prospectively be consistent with ordinary expecta- 
tions and possibilities, should promise what can reas- 
onably be fulfilled, should be considered simply as a 
start rather than as a finish, and above all, should 
not let the vital meaning, the lifelong importance, 
the sacredness of the day, become buried beneath a 
mass of ephemeral and bombastic nonsense, seems 
equally true, in fact seems pre-eminently appropriate 
if not imperative, to anyone who has carefully ob- 
served the careers of married people, irrespective of 
the ways they began them. A simple sacred 
spiritual wedding, in the presence of heart feeling 



THE WEDDING DAY 287 

and true wishing home-folk, is so thoroughly appro- 
priate, that the wonder is that any other can ever 
be thought of. In after life, it is the wedding fact 
itself that counts most seriously, and not the dis- 
play and social attractions and vaulting ambitions 
which may have seemed so primarily important at 
the time. In either event, whether quiet, simple and 
at home, or ostentatious and public, let there not fail 
to be actually a " wedding," and not a mere " func- 
tion," noted merely as of about equal significance 
with others in the social tide, and no more. 

Nor should the ceremony itself be shortened or 
practicalized in obedience to any sort of so-called 
" modern conception of life." While marriage by 
" contract " is undoubtedly a legal marriage, it does 
not follow that the parties thus united are as favor- 
ably impressed as they may be if the ideality and 
seriousness which so properly belong to the rite are 
suitably recognized and inculcated. On no account 
should the service be other than thoroughly ideal ; its 
diction should be as pure and yet as penetrative as a 
sunbeam ; the preliminaries to the ceremony extended 
enough for the existing mental and emotional confu- 
sion to subside, and to admit of the listeners grasp- 
ing all the high cultural importance of the hour; 
while the celebrant should be one of such good mo- 
tive, kindly heart and practice and voice, that heaven 
itself will seem to descend like a dove and claim the 
hour and its children for its very own. If over the 
pale faces of our lost ones we can be made to think 
of high things and good, none the less should it be 
possible, that in the midst of our highest felicity we 
should be made to think, to feel, to assimilate, much 



*>88 HIGHER LIVING 

that is equally high and equally good. Marriage is 
the one opportunity for many, when certain very defi- 
nite increments of most useful culture can be help- 
fully inculcated and as helpfully received. 

The significance of this was strongly suggested by 
an observation that was as beautiful as it was im- 
portant. 

One evening, out from the mid-winter snow and 
cold, there appeared at the home of a clergyman a 
couple, whose outer appearance showed that their 
threescore years of battling with the world had 
brought them little besides poverty and discourage- 
ment, as well as death of every laudable ambition. 
Yet here they were, with a most earnest request for 
marriage. The wise clergyman seemed to wonder 
at this, and instead of carelessly complying, paused 
and questioned them, seriously and long, as to their 
motives, and especially as to their prospects of be- 
ing able successfully to adjust themselves to the 
new relationship proposed. Finally, after being 
convinced of the propriety of their request, he pro- 
ceeded to join their hands in the usual manner, and 
then — hesitated. Evidently he could not satisfy 
his sense of responsibility by repeating any of the 
usual words or formulae. So, after a few moments, 
he said simply, " Beloved, let us pray." And what 
a vivid picturing for the waif-like couple before him 
of all the unrealizations of their lives thus far, fol- 
lowed, and how he did pour out his very soul in most 
serious instruction as to what they were taking upon 
themselves, what it could mean to them both, what 
the community expected of them, and what the 
church had to offer them by way of counsel and com- 



THE WEDDING DAY 280 

fort and protection in all good endeavor! He then 
closed with an exhortation to be worthy of this high 
privilege that must have penetrated to their very 
souls ! Certainly, as never before, did these poor 
people get notions of married life, notions of citi- 
zenship, notions of individual life, such as would 
prove, if anything could prove, to be a safe chart 
for all their subsequent voyaging, and a means of 
unfailing encouragement, as well. 



CHAPTER XXII 
THE SWEET NEW LIFE 



We will begin the new love of woman and man, no 
longer that of boy and girl, conscious that we have aims 
and purposes, as well as affections, and that if love is 
sweet, life is dreadfully stern and earnest. 

HUXLEY TO HIS INTENDED 

Sympathy is unavoidable between two persons who 
look ever so little into each other's hearts and compare 
tastes and desires. c. d. warner 

Calm solitary days of the spring-time of marriage 
spread a carpet of flowers over the path of these two 
beings. 

Beautiful hours when in every cloud stood a smiling 
angel who, instead of rain-drops, showered down flowers. 

Enjoy untroubled, for the time being, O my hero, this 
refined sugar of life, and empty the dish of sweetmeats 
which the forenoon offers thee. jean paul 

And so, dearest, I solemnly devote myself to thee, — 
consecrate myself to be thine. I thank thee that thou 
has thought me not unworthy to be thy companion on 
the journey of life. I have undertaken much. * * * 
The thought of the great duties which I take upon me, 
makes me feel how little I am. But the feeling of the 
greatest of these duties shall exalt me; and thy love, 
thy too favorable opinion of me, will lend to my imper- 
fection all that I want. * * * Hand in hand we shall 
traverse it (life) and encourage and strengthen each 
other, until our spirits — O may it be together — shall 
rise to the eternal fountain of all peace. 

FICHTE TO JOHANNA RUHN 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE SWEET NEW LIFE 

Succeeding the momentous wedding-day come the 
honeyed weeks, in which the real acquaintance of 
those who have hitherto been so near and yet so far 
is made. Before this all has been so vague as to 
escape definition. Before this the young couple's 
dreams have mostly been of the vast diffusive order, 
which, although often satisfying to the heart, almost 
as often lead the head greatly to wonder or even to 
query unto most serious doubting. Now, there is 
revelation and comprehension, each of the other, 
surprise at the unexpected, and a challenge to accept 
or reject, at almost every turn. Now is the great 
acquaintance, the full understanding, to be reached. 
Said Wordsworth, when told of a certain startling 
elopement, " So Robert Browning and Elizabeth 
Barrett have gone off together. I hope they under- 
stand each other — nobody else would." Gradually 
the mystery which first attracted two human beings 
is now to be cleared, gradually the two souls are to 
merge into one ; and chiefly this most intimate ac- 
quaintance is to be made, in order that for them- 
selves the bond which alone makes marriage real and 
lasting, ma}' be discovered. For the first time in 
life thus far these two people are really to meet 
face to face not only with themselves, but with each 

other. God grant that the truly distinctive ele- 

293 



294 HIGHER LIVING 

ments of their respective characters may be such as 
not only to justify the marriage, but likewise to con- 
serve all the patience, hopefulness and courage which 
are so necessarily required to assure its prosperity ! 

Out from the old homes, too, out from the paren- 
tal sheltering, out from childhood's freedom and 
youth's apprenticeship, goes the newly married 
couple for their first real excursion into the world 
together. Up from the lower planes of human devel- 
opment where the bride for a time is kept on public 
exhibition, or where for a season she is loaned to 
admiring friends, custom has advanced to where she 
is at once taken possession of by her lord, and in his 
companionship starts upon the way of married life. 
To a few, this necessarily means an immediate set- 
tling down to ordinary everyday work; to others, it 
means a brief " trip " to friends or conventional re- 
sorts ; to an increasing number, a " tour " only, 
either domestic or foreign, but of striking extent, 
suffices. With everyone, it seems to be natural to 
consider the honeymoon experience as something 
that will mark the beginning of married life appro- 
priately. 

However, as one thinks of what is really implied 
by " Their Wedding Journey," one recalls what Mr. 
W. D. Howells says at the beginning of his book 
bearing this 'very title, " I shall have nothing to do," 
says he, " but talk of some ordinary traits of Ameri- 
can life as these appeared to them," that is, to the 
newly-wed, and " to speak a little of well-known and 
everyday accessible places, to present now a bit of 
landscape and now a sketch of character." Yet one 
wonders none the less whether most wedding tourists 



THE SWEET NEW LIFE 295 

would be able very well to describe many incidents 
by their own way, or many landscapes or characters, 
either, save perhaps where something important to 
themselves had happened, or where certain people 
had accentuated their mutual egotism by some un- 
expected show of attention. As " Isabel " says in 
the book, " There will not be a suspicion of honey 
moonshine about us; we shall do just like anybody 
else, — with a difference, dear, with a difference " ; 
and one suspects that it is just this " difference " 
which makes the wedding journey a somewhat serious 
fact, only to be undertaken in the proper spirit and 
understanding. 

In just what this difference consists, it is hard to 
think, much less describe, although we can ordinarily 
rule out much that might be ascribed to the influ- 
ence of places, landscapes, and characters. Perhaps 
we may get help from what Lady Mary Montagu 
says in a letter about an " old maid " that had re- 
cently married a rich man " with all his glory," but 
of whom she remarks, " never bride had fewer en- 
viers, the dear beast of a man is so filthy, frightful, 
odious and detestable." But, she continues, " They 
were married on Friday, and came to church en pa- 
rade on Sunday. I happened to sit in the pew with 
them and had the horror of seeing Mrs. Bride fall 
fast asleep in the middle of the sermon, and snore 
very comfortably; which made several women in the 
church think the bridegroom not quite so ugly as 
they did before." This leads one to wonder just 
how much of an inkling of what the " several women " 
might have characteristically recognized as belong- 
ing appropriately and simply to the eternal fitness 



296 HIGHER LIVING 

of things, was suggested. For, undoubtedly, the 
couple had accepted each other so fully that no man- 
ner of doubt concerning the world's ability to stand, 
despite their self-absorption, could interfere even 
with sound sleep in church! 

From another couple, depicted so admirably in 
Charles Dudley Warner's " A Little Journey in the 
World," we get a somewhat different suggestion. 
" In the first days," says he, " she dwelt much on this 
theme, ' little touches that remind one of home ' ; in- 
deed it was hardly second in her talk — her worship 
— I can call it nothing less — of her husband. She 
liked to talk of Brandon (her childhood home) and 
the dear life there and the dearer friends — this 
much talk about it showed that it was another life, 
already of the past, and beginning to be distant in 
the mind. * * * Margaret, thus early, was con- 
scious of a drift, of a widening space, and was mak- 
ing an effort to pull the two parts of her life to- 
gether." Perhaps the effort to pull together the life 
before and after marriage is not always so clearly 
recognized or so well managed, but it often gives tone 
and color, even to the earlier weeks of closest asso- 
ciation, sometimes beyond possible subduing or era- 
sure. Life has few psychological moments more 
vital than are some of those especially belonging 
to this period. " Before marriage," says Flaubert, 
of " Madame Bovary," " she thought herself in love; 
but the happiness that should have followed this love, 
not having come, she must, she thought, have been 
mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one 
meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, 
rapture, that had seemed so beautiful in books." 



THE SWEET NEW LIFE 297 

This brings to mind the fact that many people pre- 
conceive such vividly ideal images of the person they 
wish to marry and, especially of the experiences to 
follow, that not until the harsh awakening itself, do 
they find out that the real person is a very differ- 
ent thing, and the experiences not as dreamed of, 
at all, — a revelation that often comes very early and 
often leads to results that are seldom recovered from. 
Another truth is pitiful, too, namely, that so many 
people, especially women, are obliged to undergo the 
strain, the surprises, the deep forced questions of the 
" honeymoon," when they are so exhausted, distrait 
and unstable from foolish customs that now force 
them to go beyond their strength, that they have 
neither susceptibility nor response sufficient for 
their needs. Can it never be recognized in time, that 
human nature when fagged out in one respect is un- 
fitted safely to undergo fagging in some other one 
or more ways? Overwork, overstimulation, overten- 
sion, close up until the wedding day, is no sort of 
preparation for continued unrest, hard journeying, 
much visiting and unique experiencing, so soon after- 
wards. Sensibly speaking, it would seem that such 
momentous experiences would better be entered upon 
only after prolonged rest has brought about the re- 
pose and good health of mind and body that are so 
emphatically needed. With reference to what fre- 
quently follows, it could sometimes only too truly be 
said, that the young bride is so tired, and has so 
little stamina, resilience or endurance left, and yet 
must nevertheless continue to carry such a burden 
of social whirl and personal hardship, that very 
.soon indeed there comes a moment when there is left 



298 HIGHER LIVING 

very little desire for that companionship of either 
body or soul, which, supposably, is so desirable at 
this time. And when one considers the sources of 
insidious division that are sometimes disclosed just 
here; the false notes that detract so much from the 
soul music, then and after; the imperative impulses 
and moods which at this time are quite as likely to 
grow harsh and harmful, as otherwise; the benumb- 
ing of sensibility and the obscuration of much else, 
that is naturally owing to lowered nutritional con- 
ditions and the poisons that go with these, — when 
one considers all these, and all that necessarily 
grows out of these, one would be little less than hu- 
man not sternly to cry out in behalf of suffering and 
endangered humanity against all present customs 
that are so senseless, and try to promote those in- 
stead which would prove safe and more satisfactory. 
Indeed, stern duty again compels nothing less than 
the saying of still another word, — the delicate one 
about certain people, of whom it was said, " they 
knew one another too well for any of those sur- 
prises of possession that increase its joys a hundred 
fold." Few people seem to realize the pathetic dan- 
ger there is in a satiation of sensibility until all too 
late for the prevention of the shuddering antipathy 
which physiologically may follow. Just a little re- 
serve here, just a little maintaining of a continuous 
possibility of fresh surprises of companionship to- 
gether with a thought of a future which may not be- 
come cloyed and disgusted, and a most tender re- 
gard for the natural rhythm of body and soul, — 
these all are of the vital order which is dependent 
on strength and endurance, and without which the 



THE SWEET NEW LIFE 299 

early days of married life may become prophetic of 
unsatisfactory years, forever after. 

However, to give even these most necessary warn- 
ings concerning these days of halcyonic complete- 
ness, must seem to most people about as appropriate 
as to urge them not to u die of sunstroke in Febru- 
ary ! " Indeed, did not James Freeman Clarke once 
say, " I suspect that no one can be a genuine re- 
former and not be ridiculous "? Besides, who really 
has the heart ever to obtrude prosy facts of in- 
structed and disciplined life upon this time of rosy 
castle-building, anyway? Just as children must 
pass through, or ought to be allowed to pass through 
undisturbed, a period of vivid imaginary construc- 
tion in which a small foundation of fact supports 
ever so many tiers of fanciful superstructure, so now 
let there be opportunity, as never again, say many, 
for full enjoyment of all the luxurious guessing at 
what may be, or can be, or ought to be, and this 
with every anxious if well-meaning instructor kept 
mostly at a safe distance ! Spain itself is in posses- 
sion now, or else, is certainly possessable, at will. 
On gossamer lines against the sun are constructed 
romantic nests for swaying moonbeams only, in 
which, God willing, shall forever live super-angelic be- 
ings in the midst of enchantments untold. No Phoe- 
bus has driven nor shall ever drive the sun, as shall 
one as yet unnamed. On wings of love celestial let all 
be borne hither and thither as wish or will shall de- 
termine. Close to heaven is it all, so close that the 
music thereof as well as the radiance from the throne 
itself, shall make glad, unto all eternity. Yes, let 
the time pass — all too quickly for many ; too seri- 



300 HIGHER LIVING 

ously for some; too foolishly for others. But do 
not let us too harshly obtrude anything from a world 
where facts are cold and fancy not overwarm. Back 
upon this blessed dreaming of the after-wedding 
days, let it be possible ever after to look at a bril- 
liance — a color so fascinating — that, whatever 
may come, there shall always be remembered joy, 
and, with this, renewed inspiration! The best of 
life's happiness often has its source in flights of 
waywardness which no kind of hard sense can ever 
justify. Yet, if the first sweet madness of married 
life is thus to be tenderly sheltered, it must be said 
that it should be entirely worthy of all such risky 
confidence, made so largely because of the good un- 
derstanding and hope which so timely and so seri- 
ously has truly prepared the way. Anything less 
than this will frustrate justice, in spite of mercy's 
glad protest, and happiness will be for the day only ! 



CHAPTER XXIII 
UNFORESEEN DANGERS 



A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion produces 
strange acoustical effects, and makes the ear greedy to 
remark offense. Hence we find those who have once 
quarrelled carry themselves distantly and are ever 
ready to break the truce. Robert louis stevenson 

Earth bears no balsam for mistakes; 

Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool 
That did his will; but thou, O Lord, 

Be merciful to me, a fool. e. r. sill 

No human being can control love, and no one is to 
blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone 
degrades a woman is falsehood. george sand 

Since when did the truest love prevent a man from be- 
ing petulant, even to the extent of wounding those he 
best loves, especially if the loved one shows scruples 
where sympathy is needed. 

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

If we're men, and have men's feelings, I reckon we 
must have men's troubles. We can't be like the birds, 
as fly from their nest as soon as they've got their wings, 
and never know their kin when they see 'em, and get a 
fresh lot every year. adam bede 

If he would have held her hands between his and 
listened with the delight of tenderness and understand- 
ing to all the little histories which made up her experi- 
ence, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy 
in return, so that the past life of each could be undivided 
in their- mutual knowledge and affection — or if she 
could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses 
which are the heart of every sweet woman who has be- 
gun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald 
doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from 
the wealth of her own love ! george eliot 



CHAPTER XXIII 

UNFORESEEN DANGERS 

When, soon after marriage, Jane Welsh Carlyle 
wrote to her husband's mother, " He is really at 
times a tolerably social character," and then, later 
on, could repeatedly write whole letters to the same 
interested person without even mentioning his name, 
one does not need to learn unusual lessons from the 
future history of this illustrious couple. Their 
united fortunes were portentously weighted from 
the first. One remembers the significance of the 
fact that long before her marriage, Edward Irv- 
ing, whom Miss Welsh really loved, had written her, 
" When I am in your company my whole soul would 
rush to serve you " ; and yet not so very long after- 
wards, had married another! One remembers also 
that close to the end of her life, this modern wife said 
of herself, " I married for ambition. Carlyle has 
exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of 

him and I am miserable " ; and cannot forget 

either the soul-rending sorrow that is testified to by 
him, in turn, as he writes after her death, " Noble 
little heart ! her painful, much-enduring, much- 
endeavoring little history, now at last crowned with 
victory. * * * Right silent and serene is she, my 
lost darling as I often think of in my gloom, no more 

sorrow for her nor will there long be for me." Re- 

303 



304 HIGHER LIVING 

membering all this, one does not wonder at the com- 
ment of Tennyson's, made, according to Chesterton, 
when he first heard of it, that he could not agree 
" that the Carlyles ought never to have married, since 
if they had each married elsewhere there would have 
been four miserable people instead of two ! " 

Said the unmarried Phoebe Cary, when someone 
asked her if she had " ever been disappointed in 
love," " Oh, no, but I have known a good many mar- 
ried people who have been." Granting her witty re- 
tort to be true, we need not nevertheless suppose 
that, for instance, John Ruskin was especially dis- 
appointed, when his wife and the artist Millais con- 
ceived such an attachment for each other that for 
him to consent to their marriage seemed the best as 
well as the only ultimatum. Probably the friends 
on either side, who had originally brought about the 
Ruskin wedding, did not understand the insecurity 
of the bond which they had thus helped to forge, or 
they would have done otherwise. 

In fact, no one can predict the final outcome of 
any instance of human marriage, no matter what 
first appearances may indicate. Sometimes the par- 
ties themselves and the circumstances of their birth 
and breeding and achievement all seemingly point 
to but one and that a satisfactory result, while actual 
life eventually realizes something very different. In- 
deed, how often is it seen that two people, even when 
young, handsome, cultivated, well-off and starting 
with every promise of success, are found before very 
long to be getting more and more divergent and dis- 
satisfied, and in the end practically ruined; while 
certain others, with little or nothing to cheer them 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 305 

on, and with no or little promise of stability, rise, 
step by step, to the prosperity in love, position, and 
possessions, which ultimately makes them worthy 
the admiration if not the envy of all. Why these 
should prosper and the others fail must depend, if 
not on pure luck, then on something that must be 
intelligible, and consequently worth every effort to 
find out. 

Often the disastrous outcome of an unstable mar- 
riage is owing to the fact simply, that the endanger- 
ing and separating difficulty arises and develops so 
insidiously that the mischief is mostly done before 
the couple is aware. One day a carpenter wished to 
separate two pieces of valuable board that had been 
firmly glued together. Now he did not proceed at 
all hurriedly or brutally to do this. On the con- 
trary, step by step and one by one, did he at first 
carefully insinuate on every side the thinnest wedges, 
only ; after which, even more carefully still, thicker 
and thicker ones, until in the end, complete separa- 
tion was effected. So it is in married life. The very 
thinnest of divisive wedges often as unsuspectingly 
as insinuatingly suffice to make the start; then, per- 
haps, larger and larger ones follow with their more 
potent influence, but often so insidiously again that 
the couple is actually forced asunder, and before the 
means of the process is very clearly noted. Thus, in 
some particular instance, the initial wedge may be an 
unduly assertive individuality, or lack of enduring at- 
tractiveness ; in another, love of change ; in a third, 
revival of an old passional interest or development 
of a new one; or, it may be some strange abnormal 
fascination, a capricious freak of temperament, an 



306 HIGHER LIVING 

ungovernable impulse; or, slow but sure growth of 
antipathy, or revulsion from brutal or unrefined con- 
duct ; or loneliness, innate weakness, loose suggestion, 
hateful back-biting, or, face to face insult; or any 
one or more of many other forms of divisive influ- 
ence. Whatever it is, it surely opens the way, if 
never so slightly, for the introduction of still more 
attractive influences, those which stimulate and 
tempt, which promise luxuriously and dazzle with 
every false sheen, but which eventually overcome 
and separate into fragments, forevermore! The 
married couple that is so fortunate as timely to 
recognize and cast out all the first small wedges, sel- 
dom have much to apprehend from the influence of 
any other kind. 

Thus we see that some things certainly are, or 
may be, intelligible from the start. In fact, we may 
further see that the practical basis of the perma- 
nency of every marriage is mutual appreciation of 
each other's worth as an individual, good fellowship 
in joy and sorrow, an indomitable spirit of pardon, 
and patience with every kind of failure or incompe- 
tence, and unfailing helpfulness in all the legitimate 
enterprises engaged in. Where this is, God does 
join permanently, and man cannot put asunder, if 
he try. The true promise of such a marriage as 
that of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophie Peabody, 
for instance, could not at first be enshrined in the 
mere promise of either for a very smooth or a very 
easy life; yet death only could disturb the equa- 
nimity of their mutual appreciation, cheer and help. 
Matthew Arnold and Frances Wrightman had many 
years of separation all through their married life, 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 307 

and always had to keep on " managing," just to live; 
but after thirty-five years of such struggle, he could 
address her as " My Sweet Granny," promise to 
" scratch a line every day if I can," and praise her 
for telling him of the household pony's death by 
writing that she had done " beautifully, just all that 
I should naturally want to know; and all you have 
done, is exactly right, and as I could wish." 
Thomas Huxley and Henrietta Heathorn had to wait 
seven years for prospects to brighten sufficiently to 
warrant their marriage at all. But how, through 
thick and thin, joy and sorrow, strength and weak- 
ness, they subsequently did bless each other, even 
unto the end, is the encouraging knowledge for us 
all! And so it is with millions who have no public 
history. These marry, and instinctively or cul- 
turally appreciate each other, help and cheer them- 
selves on, until eternity itself cannot separate them ; 
and the world is again and again assured of the 
basic stability of every right marriage. 

In all these cases it is Nature that does the most 
toward insuring ultimate success. As has already 
been noted, here certain important temperamental 
adjustments, physical, mental and spiritual, as well 
as certain predispositions to mutual effort and con- 
comitant growth and the similar powers of activity 
and endurance that go along with these, uncon- 
sciously contribute to make the marriage complete 
and permanent. Life in such marriages is endured, 
achieved, and conquered, hand in hand and heart 
to heart; and what love initiated, mutual trust and 
appreciation eternally perpetuates. 

On the other hand, there are many other mar- 



308 HIGHER LIVING 

riages where nature has not been so propitious, and 
these need most careful consideration. 

In these cases, there has evidently been no natural 
harmonizing of the respective fortunes of the con- 
tracting parties for the permanent enjoyment of 
their unique privileges and responsibilities. For it 
is a fact that whenever either party becomes to the 
other unattractive either in person, speech, or con- 
duct, or fails to maintain the parity of usefulness 
and cheering companionship which human nature 
everywhere seeks and needs, the way opens for in- 
trusive, and possibly irresistibly divisive influences, 
to enter in and duly mar or destroy the married 
life. Hence it follows, that if these marriages are 
more frequently to result in permanent satisfaction 
than now, it is certain that some sort of high adap- 
tive culture must be relied upon to develop what Na- 
ture has so predetermined will continue to be lack- 
ing, if this is not done. In this, we may see that 
something akin to art — indeed, the finest art — has 
here a function of the highest order possible; and 
that it may be predicted that the worth and per- 
petuity of marriage for most people does depend and 
must depend exactly upon the highest grade of this 
finest of arts which they undertake or are capable 
of achieving. And it may also be premised, that 
for many persons there will be little or no art of 
this useful order, if its foundations have not been 
laid in the appropriate training of the parties con- 
cerned, long before the wedding day arrives. Where 
this has not been done, where there has been little 
or no instruction as to the right purpose or right 
point of view or real needs, in anticipation of mar- 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 309 

riage, there is every possibility of there being more 
or less sad bungling as well as dire wastage from 
the very earliest day thereafter until the irretriev- 
able end. Where, however, there has fortunately 
been such adequate instruction and right prompting, 
then will art as applied to marriage be compara- 
tively easy of comprehension, and most helpfully in- 
fluential in daily life. 

Unquestionably, the influence of this vitalizing fine 
art is exceptionally needed at certain times — such, 
for instance, as in unexpected crises in affairs, or 
when seriously affected by shock or illness, or during 
seasons of prolonged tension of individual natures. 
Could we eliminate from married lives the frequently 
recurring emergencies that are so incalculable and 
so disturbing to many natures, their safe manage- 
ment otherwise would be comparatively easy. For 
it is these, the sudden accession of burden and de- 
mand, which try people, as little else can. Indeed 
every emergency may prove to be a veritable insult, 
either to body, or to mind, or to both. Conversely, 
also, such experiences are often of uttermost use in 
welding two souls into a oneness, not otherwise pos- 
sible. In either case, upon how these insults are re- 
ceived and reacted to, will depend the ultimate re- 
sult for good or evil. Hence, the great desirability 
of people having reached marriage with entirely ade- 
quate discipline in respect of savingly and construc- 
tively reacting to every emergency. So, too, with 
respect to prolonged tension of mind or body. 
Sooner or later the break may and often does come, 
unless previous training has prepared the individual 
for such experiences. The starter in a Marathon 



310 HIGHER LIVING 

race may lead until near the finish, but in the end 
many fail because of a lack of endurance. They who 
start, never so gloriously, in the way of marriage re- 
lationship and its long course may, because of a 
similar lack of endurance, sadly disappoint, and be 
disappointed, in the end. Hence it is so necessary 
that proper cultivation of the higher faculties 
should have previously been continued with simi- 
lar training of the lower ones, from the beginning. 
Good digestion, adequate excretion, and ability to 
work and sleep, are likewise as necessary and useful 
here, as are mental furnishing, aesthetic refinement 
and spiritual nurture. In every respect, there is 
ample opportunity as well as cogent necessity for 
realizing the spirit of that fine-art which ennobles 
while it makes strong. 

Inasmuch as some people can encounter and sur- 
vive emergencies with naught but increase of strength 
and endurance and thrive at their very best on the 
excitement and variety which come with them, while 
others simply wilt and degenerate under the per- 
sistent strain of uninspiring commonplaces, it fol- 
lows that educators of every class should fully realize 
the importance of this, and endeavor properly to 
train young persons for the life before them. As it 
is, few people find out the peril of continuously be- 
ing in contact with a non-supporting environment, 
whether personal or material, until they develop a 
devitalizing revulsion which may be as full of danger 
as it is powerful. To such people, simply the mo- 
notony of married life and home providing and home 
keeping may become a torture which eventually de- 
stroys all their fine sense of honor as well as strength. 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 311 

Said an unmarried woman once : " I fear I should 
get to be so tired of him, I should explode." This 
was simply indicative of what is actually realized in 
many a life, whether of man or woman. With these 
the mere tameness of " bonded " life is found to get 
beyond the limit of endurance. Moreover, as civil- 
ization becomes more and more complex and conse- 
quently more exciting and exhaustive, it promises to 
be more and more necessary that the conserving fac- 
ulty, — the power of being perpetually agreeable and 
stimulative and consequently enduring, — shall be 
cultivated. The old idea that if two people are once 
married, every good must necessarily follow, and 
that possession of one another necessarily implies 
permanent security, as a matter of course, will have 
to give way to the much better one, that the spirit 
of marriage requires to be kept alive daily by un- 
remitting exercise of all the courtesies, kindnesses, 
forbearances, gentle persuasions, entertainment, ad- 
miration and love, that are natural to refined per- 
sons, and can be cultivated by every intelligent and 
energetic person, to their good. The woman of the 
world knows that her power over a man will last just 
as long as she makes herself essential to him, and no 
longer. The man of the world knows that if he 
is to obtain and keep the favor of any particular 
woman he must satisfy her womanly instincts and 
ambitions unfailingly and persistently. In this 
there is much instructive light upon the prospect of 
perpetuity, or the reverse, of married life. To as- 
sume that the initiative called " marriage " neces- 
sarily comprehends and assures everything that is 
permanently desirable, is prophetic of failure from 



312 HIGHER LIVING 

the beginning. On the other hand, to know 
that 

" Every day is a fresh beginning, 
Every morn is a world made new/' 

and to act upon this, is to assure all the permanency 
possible to the two natures joined. Here, it is in- 
stinctively hinted that, as Emerson says, " Intellect 
annuls Fate." Here, again, it is very evident that 
Higher Living for married people may be much more 
safely founded on comprehensible intelligence than 
upon narrow ignorance, no matter how sincere or 
devoted. 

Should the worst of all unpropitious days come, 
however, the day for which prophetic circumstance 
in a steady tide from birth onward through educa- 
tion, through experience, through everything, has 
provided fully for the day of explosion, of separa- 
tion, of sorrow (let us hope and pray not of shame), 
what shall now be our attitude, our comment, our 
hope, or our despair? We have sorrowfully watched 
the careers of just such people, noble men and fair 
women, with flawless bodies, bright minds, and true 
hearts, and seen them little by little lose the fine 
gloss of endowment and breeding under the rough 
handling of conditions for which they were neither 
to blame, nor capable of obviating or permanently 
enduring. We have seen the nerves of such grow 
bare and become irritated to a keenness unendurable ; 
we have seen their moral sense become blunted until 
the power to distinguish between right and wrong 
has gradually disappeared, and wrong has taken the 
place of right. We have seen, too, persons thus ex- 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 313 

posed resist the tide of every degenerative influence 
with a courage and will born of heaven itself seem- 
ingly, and yet just as surely yield in the end. Addi- 
tionally, how many others have similarly fallen 
apart, who by nature and breeding or both have had 
but little stamina of any kind, and of whom but little 
ought ever to have been expected; others, too, that 
were born with dominating instincts downward, who 
have seemed but to float over the first degrading 
cataract, with never an attempt even to move oppo- 
sitely. As the conjugal world has thus presented it- 
self in the concrete, the query has often come seri- 
ously to mind, " Who are the permanently married? 
Where indeed are those who will endure to the end? " 
Certainly, the thousands of openly broken mar- 
riages and the many more thousands of those cov- 
ertly broken constitute but a sad comment on our 
civilization. Nor has the effort thus far against the 
multiplication of these — legal, legislative, cultural, 
religious — seemed to have accomplished very much 
that is satisfactory. Nor will such effort, nor can it, 
do better, so long as divorce of wrongly mated per- 
sons remains legally and ecclesiastically permissible 
only after crime has been committed. That this 
should so frequently be the case ; that before divorce 
there must come crime ; and that every aspect of the 
matter should be so chiefly considered from this one 
standpoint of criminal jurisprudence, is a shame — 
a weak, truckling, degrading shame — such as should 
be tolerated only until something better has been 
found out and adopted. " Divorce," at best, is aw- 
ful enough to contemplate, without the addition of 
" crime," either before or after the event. 



31 4 HIGHER LIVING 

Moreover, just why two capable, intelligent mem- 
bers of the commonwealth, who find that they have 
made a serious blunder, which, in any other walk of 
life, it would be expected they should remedy as 
quickly as possible, but which in matrimony is ex- 
pected and even forced by custom, by superstition, 
by law and often by personal preference, to remain 
unremedied until, perchance, if not death, then 
criminal dissolution, results, is entirely beyond ra- 
tional comprehension. Such an indecency is a slur 
upon modern knowledge of human nature that should 
be obliterated just as quickly as the advancing sci- 
ence and art of life shall make it possible. Nor 
should the opposition of vested interests, whether 
economical, or ecclesiastical, or legal, or social, or 
domestic, be allowed defiantly or fallaciously much 
longer so destructively to interfere with such a bene- 
ficial course. These all have seemingly but a small 
and short vision for the real issue. Their funda- 
mental maxims have been derived largely from anti- 
quated deductive and dogmatic premises, and by 
minds acquainted not nearly so accurately with the 
results of close study of actual causes, as with the 
so-called " facts " of intuition and imagination 
which are really but products of a selfishness that is 
not promotive of the most reliable outcome. Cer- 
tainly the pressing needs of the marriage and di- 
vorce situation of today, are, that every conclusion, 
both as to those who shall contract marriage, and 
those who shall be entitled to dishonorable or honor- 
able rectification of obvious blunder, shall be de- 
rived only from the most comprehensive investiga- 
tion and study of all the facts involved that may now 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 315 

or at any future time be possible. Anything less 
than this is unjust, unsafe and unspiritual. 

As conducted at present, proceedings in reference 
either to separation or divorce are necessarily negli- 
gent of many of the most important factors con- 
cerned. Nor is there at present any way of pre- 
venting this; nor will a way be found (let it be re- 
peated and in every way emphasized) until such a 
time as the point of view of marriage itself shall have 
been changed; that is, until it comes to be intelli- 
gently and firmly accepted that the real object of 
marriage, the object primarily and above all others, 
and subject to an exclusiveness such as will make it 
the center of every intelligent consideration — that 
the real object of every marriage should be primarily 
not the happiness of parents, but the welfare of 
progeny. Of course, this does not mean that due 
weight shall not be given to the value of " romantic 
love," or to the indisputable worth of marital satis- 
faction. It only means, that, before all else, the 
needs of prospective children shall be duly and fully 
considered ; for then, and then only, will it be possible 
for the " divorce question " or any other vital ques- 
tion closely allied to this, to be righteously solved, 
and for justice to be done to all the parties con- 
cerned. As it is, spite and hatred and vice and crime 
lead up to the final action, during which course pa- 
rental demands are selfishly accentuated, while its in- 
comparably serious significance to the child is forgot- 
ten or miscalculated. As it ought to be, and as it 
sometime will be, the child's interest will be regarded 
as primary; and every legal, or religious, or social, 
or personal interest that does not regard this, will be 



316 HIGHER LIVING 

relegated to the subordinate position in which it 
justly belongs. When this comes to be universally 
the case, the entire teaching as well as growth of 
sentiment will be strictly in favor of the forethought 
and just regard for others that provides for the best 
and lasting welfare of both parents and children, and 
thus for the entire future of the race. 

When the vital interests of children are compre- 
hensively considered, it is soon noted that these 
unformed, plastic personalities are often found 
stranded between two wretchedly destructive house- 
hold fires, which can only destroy their finer sensi- 
bilities, and from which they should be kept, at all 
costs. The home in which parents are not com- 
patible is almost certain to have no sort of clear 
atmosphere for children healthily to breathe, even 
when it is doggedly maintained for their supposed 
welfare. Indeed, the hindering, degrading influence 
of a divided household and all its fault-finding and 
worse upon young children, is simply incalculable. 
This is manifest in their so often reaching adult es- 
tate with only low and fallacious estimates of the 
opposite sex, of marriage, and of the social struc- 
ture. In fact, it is almost impossible for children 
to emerge from the breeding of such a home with- 
out being painfully pessimistic and apprehensive and 
otherwise blasted, if not pitifully scarred for life, — 
a condition frequently encountered when attempts 
have been made to hold warring couples together, 
even where there was evidence of no special vice or 
crime to complicate. 

Hence, it should be more truly the business of 
those who have brought children into the world 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 317 

thenceforth to care for them, and educate them, and 
protect them, and eventually to send them forth into 
the world in a much better shape to meet its de- 
mands than now. To this end, the personal prefer- 
ences, whims and prejudices of the parents, no mat- 
ter how just or urgent, should never be allowed to 
dominate absolutely, but should be sunken to their 
proper subordinate place. Moreover, such unfor- 
tunate people are in duty bound not only never to 
desert their children, but actually to bestir them- 
selves to provide for them in every way, at least un- 
til they are old enough to provide for themselves, just 
as they would were their own personal happiness 
satisfactory. If it sometimes be thought wrong thus 
to insist upon children being retained and cared for 
by incompatible parents, especially, where by speech 
and conduct these seem evidently to be unfit for 
so high a calling, it certainly is not wrong to insist 
that such parents awaken fully and at once to the 
higher duty of being true to their children, no mat- 
ter what their differences may be, and prepare them- 
selves to do better than before. Children have a 
right to be as well brought up as possible. There is 
no ethical abrogating or usurping of this right by 
any sort of parental preference whatever. Hence, 
it should be the state's prerogative, not only to see 
to it that people provide a home for their children, 
but one whose atmosphere is as salubrious and pro- 
motive of their interests, as possible. If two people 
do not love one another they need not, to themselves, 
pretend to. But before their children let there be 
peace, oneness of purpose, and clean speech and con- 
duct ; and, let this course be continued until such time 



318 HIGHER LIVING 

as the children shall have flown to their own chosen 
environments. If when this hour comes the antipa- 
thetic or repugnant feeling between the parents still 
remains, it certainly becomes then a matter rightly 
to be settled by the parties primarily involved, pro- 
viding only, of course, that they always have due 
regard to their full duty to the necessary moral or- 
der which affects not only themselves and their house- 
holds but everybody else. 

Where, however, harmony and decency cannot pos- 
sibly be maintained in a household, where disease or 
vice or crime renders it necessary that existing rela- 
tions be severed, it seems most proper to advocate 
that permanent divorce should be secured, but only 
in accordance with principles and practices by far 
more comprehensive and just than those which now 
govern such procedures. Even here it should be con- 
sidered most nearly right that, after due investiga- 
tion by sufficiently comprehending authority, such 
people shall be granted at first only a degree of ex- 
perimental separation for a period longer or shorter, 
as circumstances may indicate. This, the " inter- 
locutory decree," not only makes the separating par- 
ties think with becoming seriousness of the step they 
are finally to take, but gives them time definitely to 
find themselves and their true relations, as well as to 
undertake an arrest or cure of the tendencies and 
practices and diseases which have provoked to the 
issue joined. If, at the end of such tentative sepa- 
ration, the need or wish for permanent separation 
dominates, then let it be the rule that, whenever not 
crime but incompatibility or other reasonable cause 
is alleged, the divorce shall always be effected, unless 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 319 

crime has become habitual and gross, with as little 
stigma as possible, and likewise with as little hard- 
ship as possible, to all parties alike. As now ob- 
tains, people who are to one another as powder and 
match often hold themselves together in a tension 
that is as dangerous as it is weakening, and finally 
to no good purpose whatever ; and this, simply be- 
cause of the awful stigma and subsequent hardship 
that is senselessly attached to what ought to be, 
what might be, considered an honorable procedure. 
That this stigma is an unjust wrong to all the par- 
ties enthralled; that it contributes toward develop- 
ing the unstable conditions of body and mind in 
which dereliction most often occurs ; that it does no 
real good either to home, to neighborhood or state, 
should be recognized, and duly incorporated in prac- 
tical life. Again and always let it be said that, when 
two people have really made a mistake of so serious 
an order as the matrimonial, there should be legal, 
honorable, comfortable, praiseworthy means of rec- 
tifying it, and this, not after the blunder has led to 
its worse results, but before. 

On the other hand, where people have selfishly or 
recklessly gone into some form of legalized vice and 
crime for relief from their personal strain or hatred, 
then should the course be very different indeed, for 
certainly the principle involved is different in every 
respect. Here, the object of investigation and ad- 
judication should be not in respect of comfort, 
honor, or praise, but rather to teach people that law 
must not be violated, and that whim and passion and 
brutality must not be recklessly indulged, no matter 
how deep the dissatisfaction. In fact every crime of 



320 HIGHER LIVING 

this nature which, upon proper investigation, is duly 
substantiated, has the greatest need to be fully dealt 
with, irrespective of the circumstances which have led 
up to it. In other relationships, " outraged law 
knows no ameliorating circumstance," or at best, 
but very little such. Nor is there any better reason 
why an unhappy marriage should be considered as 
mitigating actual crime, at least very frequently. 
The lesson to be learned and enforced is that of de- 
cent respectable separation before crime and not of 
dishonorable divorce after it. 

In either case, whether before or after crime, the 
particular adjudication of matrimonial disaffection 
should depend distinctly upon a fundamental fact, 
namely, upon the fact of progeny, or otherwise. If 
there be no children, then any sort of reasonable con- 
dition or agreement should be allowed to determine 
the final decree ; for, evidently, the adults chiefly 
concerned should be presumed to know their own per- 
sonal wants and needs. But if there be children, 
then is the condition changed, and so radically that 
judgment should exclusively have reference to their 
helpless involvement. In such cases, as has been al- 
ready said, no decree or separation should be al- 
lowed, if possible, until all the children have attained 
their majority. If, however, owing to parental in- 
capacity or other total unfitness, it seems wise to an- 
ticipate this, then the utmost care both of person and 
property should be properly provided and exercised 
by the State itself, — the party which eventually 
must assume the responsibility involved. 

As to the means by which justice in such cases 
shall be determined, there can be little doubt that 



UNFORESEEN DANGERS 321 

improvement upon present ones is imperatively re- 
quired. Few judges, referees, or juries, as these are 
commonly constituted, can justly pronounce upon 
the issues joined in such cases. In almost every 
case the physician's services are explicitly needed ; 
upon every case the trained psychologist and alienist 
might be able to throw most valuable light; while 
there is usually needed the influence of the finer re- 
gard for moral and spiritual things that the clergy- 
man is supposed to have. In fact, no decree of abso- 
lute divorce, especially where children are involved, 
should ever be granted, except at the hand of a court 
composed of jurist, alienist, physician or surgeon 
and ecclesiast, sitting in as much retirement as pos- 
sible. Publicity does not enough deter others from 
such procedures to compensate for the serious fact 
that it tends to render these commonplace and un- 
deterrent, as well as to vitiate the atmosphere of 
home and person, and even to fascinate to irritative 
activity those who thus become unduly familiar with 
such matters. 

In the golden days, when love shall truly initiate, 
when intelligence shall adequately prepare, when un- 
derstanding shall enable forbearance and righteous 
endurance, and when determination shall elevate 
rather than pull down, shall bind closer rather than 
work division, then, let us trust, will separations be 
but for a day only, with the more satisfactory mor- 
row always assured; and marriage shall come uni- 
versally to be regarded as truly the divines t institu- 
tion on earth! 



CHAPTER XXIV 
PERSONAL FREEDOM 



An evil action only makes the path for other evil acts ; 
evil thoughts uncontrollably drag out along that path. 

LEO N. TOLSTOI 

You cannot change ancestral feelings of what is right 
and wrong without what is radically soul-murder. 

R. L. STEVENSON 

If we would learn something of the Infinite, we must 
not sit idly repeating the formulas of other men and 
other days, but must gird up our loins anew and dili- 
gently explore on every side that finite realm through 
which still shines the glory of an ever present God for 
those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. 

JOHN FISKE 

It is in its readjustment into changed conditions of 
life and new views of the world that a people's faith 
best betrays whither its face is really set. That which 
conditions it then becomes the background against which 
we measure it. benj. ide wheeler 

Train your common sense and let the windy analysis 
pertaining to problems alone. Gertrude atherton 

Correct thy son and he shall give thee rest; yea, he 
shall give delight unto thy soul. holy bible 

When everything is in its right place within us, we 
ourselves are in equilibrium with the whole work of God. 

H. F. AMIEL 



CHAPTER XXIV 

PERSONAL FREEDOM 

The hardest and in some respects the most equivo- 
cal of all the battles fought, and yet to be fought, is 
that for freedom of body, mind, and soul. In so 
many ways, however, is the human personality pre- 
determined and constantly modified by forces and 
barriers without and within, that anything like suffi- 
cient freedom seems an utter impossibility. Indeed, 
notwithstanding all that the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries have done, all that liberal theology is do- 
ing, all that emancipation of slave and woman and 
child means, all that bold demands for release of uni- 
versal human nature and its inherent, inalienable 
rights point to, — all that these promise, yet how 
much progress, comparatively speaking, remains to 
be made in this important field of human achieve- 
ment. It is still as common to find the present gen- 
eration devoted to what Bacon denominated Idola, 
" false divinities," as it was in his own time, three 
hundred years ago. True, we have become emanci- 
pated from many of the Idola that were then most 
tyrannical impostors upon the freedom of man. But 
we have our own tyrants, just as truly, those before 
whom we bend in just as sycophantic worship, and 
before whose judgments, anticipated or actual, we 
quake unto our very heart ! 

Some of these tyrannical Idola we find strongly 
325 



826 HIGHER LIVING 

enthroned in our modern homes ; and their demands 
often annoy and hinder and exhaust us beyond en- 
durance. Especially is this seen in respect of 
women; but children and men are not far behind in 
suffering from the burdens which are thus ruthlessly 
and unreasonably imposed. The fact is, the modern 
home, laud it as we may, guard it as it deserves, and 
hope all things for it as we should, is latterly fast 
coming to be a place where little rest or peace, 
scarcely any inspiration or contentment, and all but 
no security, are to be found. Instead of being sub- 
ject to a dominant well-meaning will, it has suc- 
ceeded in becoming a veritable tyrant, with satraps 
as harsh as they are determined upon mercilessly 
enforcing their behests. No wonder that the mod- 
ern Home-Spirit is restless ; no wonder that families 
are becoming more and more nomadic; little won- 
der, indeed, if so many are found degenerating into 
an almost barbaric lack of home interest. Certainly 
a not very far away as well as radical emancipation 
is here needed. 

Under the inspiration of leaders like Charles Wag- 
ner, we are now hearing much about what he is 
pleased to call " The Simple Life," and the bearing 
of this upon the problem of greater personal free- 
dom. But just what is meant by this phrase, it is 
difficult to determine. In some people's minds it 
seems to mean relief from all attempts at home- 
making and home-keeping, to be succeeded appar- 
ently by the substitution of some sort of community 
life in its stead. But in respect of this, let those who 
remember, for instance, " Brook Farm " and its fate, 
beware ! For others, The Simple Life promises less 



PERSONAL FREEDOM 327 

outside pressure, less service, or less care. To 
woman it often means easier dress, fewer children, 
or the leaving of the care of children to others ; or, 
entertainment by caterers ; or, but dozens on the call- 
ing list where now there are hundreds. Some men 
are reminded by the phrase, " the simple life," that 
their own houses seem principally to be bric-a-brac 
display rooms, merely to shelter those for whom they 
plan and labor strenuously to keep " in style," and 
exhibiting nothing very satisfactory by way of com- 
pensation ; others that their table is simply a dread 
succession of senseless " courses," which are quite as 
apt to starve or poison as suitably to nourish ; others 
still, that their own selfhood is valued chiefly for 
being the necessary and permanently providing and 
co-ordinating center of the whole establishment. 
According to some minds, less show and fuss, more 
even stability of constitution, and better general run- 
ning gear, would amply serve to simplify matters to 
a sufficiently practical degree. For all, the " serv- 
ant question," and the complex matters implied by 
this, constitute Idolas, under whose sway it is cer- 
tainly not very easy or very satisfactory perma- 
nently to remain. 

Evidently, here is a field in which from the very 
intensity with which its problems are regarded, there 
is already danger to be apprehended, in that, while 
the effort to get away from trouble, or to avoid disa- 
greeable outcomes, or reasonably to be at ease even 
in " Zion," is laudable enough, there is so apt to re- 
sult failure that is fatally discouraging, especially 
just when the anticipated satisfaction is most needed. 
Even The Simple Life, as conceived by its better ad- 



328 HIGHER LIVING 

vocates, may thus prove to be quite unsatisfactory 
in the end to very many, promising as it may seem. 
In fact, let the house and its furnishing, society and 
its demands, let duty and privilege and all the rest 
be conscientiously reduced to barrenness ; not neces- 
sarily will The Simple Life thus attempted prove to 
be the bonum so eagerly desired. The true simple 
life does not flourish at its best in a bare or barren 
life at all ; nor does it in a mere paucity of environ- 
ment, in any sense. On the contrary, practical life, 
whether simple or not, ought to compass the advan- 
tage of the most varied and luxurious environment 
that can be secured and at the same time be made to 
conduce to human development. This is what hu- 
man nature needs, this is what emancipation really 
means, this is what Christian Freedom actually is ■ — 
life, luxurious life, both within the home and else- 
where. For the best of life depends upon inner pur- 
pose and energizing, in combination with outer in- 
ducements and means ; as also upon the allied fact, 
that human nature principally grows according to 
newly discovered wants or needs and the varied en- 
deavor that is required to satisfy these. Hence, the 
bare and barren life, attractive as theoretically it 
may seem, is practically too negative, has too little 
inspiration and opportunity, is too little compelled to 
exert itself, to stand rigidly for a model, or to prove 
very satisfactory as an imitation. Not haven after 
storm is the right motif here. But power to harness 
the storm, to enjoy its many features, and likewise to 
sail on, even in its raging midst. 

And this is the kind of simple life that is most 
needed today. The tyrants are still over us ; and 



PERSONAL FREEDOM 329 

even if we could depose them, being what we are and 
not readily changed, we would doubtless immediately 
enthrone others, with the same or perhaps worse 
slavery to follow. Seemingly, we cannot easily es- 
cape the tyranny of time and tide, persons and 
events, customs and duties. Epictetus, though a 
slave, by proper direction of himself, lived as hap- 
pily as he was wise. Seneca, although supremely 
busied with affairs at court, found opportunity to 
moralize for even' grade of life, and for all time. 
And so, too, did Spinoza stay himself by maintain- 
ing friendly relations with the spider who spun upon 
his cell walls, ever with companionable seemliness. 
And so, Madame Roland, even with the guillotine in 
sight, with " two hairpins and a napkin " converted 
her barren cell into the place for her work, and for 
flowers that led her jailor to call it " The Pavilion 
of Flora " ; and so also did she there write her own 
" Memoirs " and cheer her comrades and all others 
of faint heart immortally. Abraham Lincoln, in the 
midst of most horrid war, could tell his stories and 
play with his children, and be so simple, that all the 
world marvelled. Mrs. President Grant could sit 
with her husband by the evening fire, call him, as of 
old, by his first name, and knit the simplest stitches, 
while all the nation roared and throbbed with mighti- 
est political and social and theological turmoil. So 
does every one know of somebody else, who, in the 
midst of a whirl of household and social and re j 
ligious and business affairs, carries herself or him- 
self with the sweet dignity and command which be- 
calms and strengthens all who come near. Nor does 
it appear that these masterful and benign folk need 



330 HIGHER LIVING 

to have their surroundings simplified, in order to de- 
pose offending Idola, or to lead The Simple Life 
successfully. 

In the lives of these persons, then, is to be found 
the true lesson for us all. Not shrinking from house- 
hold Idola; not complaining of their exactions and 
impositions ; not stripping off environment ; not with- 
holding from fields of usefulness ; but, rather, facing 
every taskmaster so fearlessly and at the same time 
so critically, that, there shall inevitably come enjoy- 
ment of everyone of the momentous complications 
and responsibilities of modern civilization, and this 
with cheek a-tingling, heart strong-bounding, and 
hand in attitude of command; and all, simply but 
effectively by taking up the walk and work to which 
we are adapted, keeping within its wholesome limits, 
and ever substituting real and useful and pleasant 
activities and possessions for the opposite. Useless 
bric-a-brac, and all the burdensome care which this 
imposes, contributes little if anything to life, either 
simple or otherwise. In many cases it conduces 
early to exhaustion if not worse, and always may 
conduce to misery that is not easily cured. Higher 
Living demands that more attention be given, not so 
exclusively to lopping off rubbish already gathered, 
as to the art of primarity selecting such an environ- 
ment — such companions, house, treasures, church, 
society — as will result in no rubbish to be destroyed, 
and will prove to be permanently inspiring, whole- 
some and constructive, rather than the reverse. 

In general, this will always require seeking from 
the first for permanent worth, for beauty, for adapt- 
ability, for livability, rather than for conformity to 



PERSONAL FREEDOM 331 

the passing show, no matter how great the pressure. 
In seeking and realizing these fundamentals, The 
Simple Life will become fully enough manifest, even 
in the midst of all the luxury that the modern world 
can provide. Upon the life which has a proper mo- 
tive, all things, no matter how royal, reflect a vivify- 
ing light. But here, as elsewhere, it is as hard as 
it is destructive to attempt to serve two masters. 
Better serve with singleness the Love whose prime 
mission it is to make free; for then all else is eman- 
cipated along with one's own self. Even the Light of 
Life is not withheld. As Emerson says: 

" Because I was content with these poor fields, 
Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams, 
And found a home in haunts which others scorned, 
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love, 
And granted me a freedom of their state. 
And in their secret senate have prevailed 
With the dear, dangerous lords that rule our life." 

Closely associated with the feeling for personal 
freedom, is the notion that, if people would only 
read more and better, all good things, including per- 
sonal freedom, would develop accordingly. " But let 
the world of books be freely open for everyone's en- 
tering," say some, " and the regeneration of the hu- 
man spirit is bound to follow; and with this, eman- 
cipation from every tyrant within or without." In 
many respects this may be approximately true. 
With the contact of individual minds with other 
minds through reading, there usually does come a 
more or less wholesome emancipation from numerous 
whims, prejudices, narrowness and pet notions. So 



332 HIGHER LIVING 

frequently is this the case, that it seems indisputable 
that everybody should read as widely as prac- 
ticable, and chiefly for this very purpose of achiev- 
ing all the sense of personal freedom possible. Prob- 
ably no one step in the recent history of the race is 
more important than this. The intelligent, ready 
talker and worker can scarcely be prepared for his 
own particular needs, except through the medium of 
much reading. Not only to learn what has already 
been done and to find out what is still possible results 
from reading, but there are elements of growth, dis- 
cipline and self-finding, to say nothing of recreation, 
in broadly reading, that cannot be realized in any 
other way. To the praise of reading then and its 
emancipating influence, every sensible person is easily 
committed. 

But like every other good thing, reading must be 
engaged in with discrimination. In proper amount 
and quality it is undoubtedly helpful. When the 
case is otherwise, grave questions arise as to whether 
it be helpful, or not. Lowell is quoted in effect that 
any kind of reading is better than none. It takes 
little observation, however, to find that some kinds 
of reading are worse than none. Many a young 
person has thus been given word-pictures of vices and 
crimes which have been ineradicable in all their sub- 
sequent life, and have thus been subjected to a set 
of inner tyrants from which no good could possibly 
come. Psychologically, we know that any vivid 
mental imagery is apt to be permanent, and this in 
spite of all opposition to compel a subsequent course 
of events in conformity with it. 



PERSONAL FREEDOM 333 

" Once git a smell o' musk into a draw, — 
It holds like the percedents of law." 

Once get a sniff of literary carrion, and no subse- 
quent perfume or disinfectant can completely over- 
come or eradicate it. So it may well be thought 
that reading, especially throughout the earlier years, 
should at least be clean and truthful and inspiring 
to all that is higher rather than lower in life. 

Inspired by the rise of interest in reading, there 
has come to be a whole literature especially designed 
for the young reader, of which untold good is com- 
monly expected. Some of it is excellent — very 
good, indeed. Much is a mere dilution of better 
work, and, generally speaking, is no fit substitute for 
it, and, worse yet, it is apt to bar from acquaintance 
the more useful original. To the great loads of in- 
ane, filthy, exciting, soul-burning rubbish that is now 
greedily furnished and so greedily read by young 
persons, only condemnation can be given: a course, 
however, that serves too often but to emphasize 
rather than prevent its circulation and reading. 

In rational consideration of all the present encour- 
agements to reading, then, as well as the ample pro- 
vision now made for all classes, the question, what 
and how to read, has become a matter of anxious 
concern to many parents, teachers and librarians. 
In order to answer this question to any very good 
purpose, certain principles should be kept constantly 
in mind. 

1. All literature worth reading is itself either clean 
in word and fact, and so subserves its own high aim, 



SM HIGHER LIVING 

or else directly exposes what is objectionable in a 
way not unduly to stimulate curiosity and imagina- 
tion, and so defeat its better uses. 

2. If reading does not truly construct one — that 
is, inform, discipline and inspire — it is very apt 
indirectly, but none the less actually, to destroy men- 
tal and moral integrity — that is to scatter-brain, 
interfere with real learning, and eventually to con- 
fuse and depress and atrophy all that one ought to 
know and practice concerning most of the vital ques- 
tions that come up for definite answer. 

S. Contrary to the usual expectation, reading for 
entertainment alone is not very often of most use. 
Like any other indulgence, it soon reaches the limit 
of acceptance and enjoyment. On the other hand, 
right-reading, that is reading for instruction and in- 
spiration, is found even more and more enjoyable by 
almost every one, if only they persist in this practice 
rather than the other. 

4. All good literature becomes interesting as soon 
as we grow to its style and meaning. The only way 
to reach this growth, however, is by reading good 
literature almost exclusively, and by training the 
mind somewhat persistently to dwell upon what is 
found therein. 

5. Literature that does not require more or less 
effort to comprehend its meaning lacks usefulness to 
just this degree. Hence, that which has been " writ- 
ten down " to the comprehension of the illiterate is 
not likely to build even this kind of reader up to 
anywhere near the extent expected. 

With these principles in mind, it becomes clear 
that much of even the so-called " good reading " of 



PERSONAL FREEDOM $S5 

these times necessarily defeats the supposed good of 
it, even by its very quality of unfitness. For, closely 
examined, it is often by implication, if not worse, 
decidedly unclean; or it so treats legitimate subjects 
that it weakens rather than strengthens and misleads 
rather than corrects ; or it amuses until it cloys, or 
perhaps destroys ability to enjoy anything else en- 
tirely ; or it discourages from reading the standards ; 
all of which leads to lazy acceptance and heedless fol- 
lowing of every kind of notion and promise, instead 
of that which is healthy, wholesome, recreative and 
inspiring, and so in every way constructive. 

The fact is, in order especially to neutralize the 
vicious influence of what is bound to be read else- 
where — in newspapers, magazines, and second-class 
works of every sort — every one should daily read 
something that has been tried and not found wanting. 
Our fathers thus used the Bible, and by this use 
gained much that their glib children lose. Today 
only a few are so fortunate as to live in families where 
the old classics are accessible. These, handled over 
and over again, and read and re-read, are always 
formative in a degree truly marvelous. Others have 
been fortunate enough to hear Scott and Dickens 
and Eliot and Hawthorne and Thackeray, and the 
brighter essays and books of science and art, read 
aloud and talked over in the home or school circle, 
and to what high cultural end the testimony of He- 
lena Modjeska, for instance, is convincing. Happy 
the day, most useful the day, when to a larger and 
larger extent only these tried and trusty friends — 
the " five-foot shelf " of standards — and the excep- 
tional newcomer will be allowed entrance into the 



336 HIGHER LIVING 

literature lists of the home, to become the daily com- 
panions as well as true inspirers and most wholesome 
entertainers. By all means, let these strong, in- 
viewing, logical, artistic, true literatures become 
more and more the daily perusal of young people — 
even the children of the time. They will not under- 
stand them all, of course. But better than under- 
standing will be the unqualified growth of spirit and 
the ultimate spiritual freedom that will come from 
such habitual acquaintance with the deepest thinking, 
the truest feeling, the highest hope of the literary 
world. The springs of spiritual freedom thus re- 
plenished will never clog up. The resulting freedom 
itself will never prove to be other than an eternal 
safety and satisfaction ; for any sort of freedom that 
is worth achieving, must, in order to be stable, have 
for its foundation, not alone strong motive and equal 
will-power, but intelligence and discipline and careful 
practice, and more careful self-criticism, as well. 

Actual personal freedom is an achievement from 
within. No scientist can find a better way. No 
legislature can decide on, no educator advise, no re- 
ligionist reveal one, that is surer or more easily tra- 
versed. The summoning of the required courage 
and impulse, the overcoming of difficulties by the 
way, the eternal hope that allures on and on, the 
noting of progressive successes, and the certainty of 
complete success in the end, all have an interest for 
the emancipating mind that stimulates while it actu- 
ates, and compensates while it strives. 

In order best to achieve personal freedom from 
within, one must keep clearly and unremittingly be- 
fore the mind a model, as it were, of the free person- 



PERSONAL FREEDOM 337 

ality whose energizing is always toward the " far-off 
divine event " and whose progress step by step is pro- 
moted always by the realization thus far made. By 
keeping such a model in mind, one tends naturally to 
grow in its direction and away from every other in- 
fluence that is not closely corresponding to it. Just 
as a would-be musician, by keeping his mind on the 
kind of a technician he would like to be, finds all his 
exercises thus helped very materially, so will he who 
would emerge from the tyranny of his personal Idola 
find himself helped by frequently conjuring up in 
definite mental and emotional portraiture the kind of 
freedom of personality he aspires to. At any rate, 
every such effort from within is bound to reap its 
just reward, because it is made in strict accordance 
with the psychological law, that as we set a copy 
and practice it, so do we grow, whether consciously 
or not. This is the law of achievement from within, 
in any sense. In respect of personal freedom, it is 
pre-eminently so, even as it is in respect of every 
other element of Higher Living known. 



CHAPTER XXV 
HELPFUL ASSOCIATIONS 



It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins, 
than to have a nerve tapped. . . . There are men that 
it weakens to talk with an hour more than a day's fast- 
ing Would do. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

Alone, self-poised, henceforward man 

Must labor; must resign 

His all to human ends, and scan 

Simply the way divine. matthew Arnold 

There is nothing in the universe which accomplishes 
so much as the incessant, cumulative action of tiny 
causes. john fiske 

Let us learn through one another what it is to live. 
Let us set our minds and habitudes in order, and so 
grow under the peaceful sunshine of nature, that what- 
ever fruit or flowers have been implanted in our spirits 
may ripen wholesomely and be distributed in due season. 

THOMAS CARLYLE TO JANE WELSH 

Beyond all wealth, honor or even health, is the attach- 
ment we form to noble souls ; because to become one with 
the good, generous, and true, is to become in a measure 
good, generous, and true ourselves. 

DR. THOMAS ARNOLD 

Live with wolves and you will learn to howl. 

SPANISH PROVERB 

Men may associate, and waive almost all other differ- 
ences but that of character. The moral line reaches up 
to heaven and down into eternal depths. It cannot be 
passed and repassed. theodore t. munger 

So teach us to number our days that we may apply 
our hearts unto wisdom. the bible 



CHAPTER XXV 

HELPFUL ASSOCIATIONS 

It is oft repeated and generally accepted that 
" a man is known by the company he keeps." It is 
urged upon all young people that they should chiefly 
seek to associate with those " above " them and thus 
to advance themselves accordingly. This is called 
" legitimate ambition," in obedience to one of the 
laws of betterment. It " works " practically and is 
seldom criticized, either as a theory or practice. 
We see everywhere persons devoting their entire 
strength and time to attempts to get alongside those 
whom they socially or religiously or politically exalt, 
or into the more exclusive circles that have been or- 
ganized in obedience to the same impulse. The in- 
stinct to betterment along lines of hero worship, even 
unto becoming a rival hero to be in turn worshipped, 
is considered to be one of the mainsprings to prog- 
ress towards civilization. How far one should be 
guided by it often becomes a matter of serious bear- 
ing upon one's destiny. It may matter greatly 
whether one belongs to one circle or club or church 
or party or neighborhood, or another. In any 
case the tone, the trend, the actual sayings and do- 
ings of the group in which one mostly associates, un- 
consciously as well as consciously molds one in some 
particular direction, whether this is desired or not. 
It proves to be the subtlest, most influential element 

341 



U% HIGHER LIVING 

in one's environment for good or the reverse. The 
body yields to it often in unrecognized but definite 
ways, the mind is bent by its persistent invitation 
or urgency, the inmost soul of one is led and forced 
into channels as profitable or as fatal as any that 
are met with in all one's experience. 

This should be seriously borne in mind as one 
aspires to get named as a member of any selective 
group. Not only what the group looks like at the 
present moment is worth while, but what it has ad- 
vanced from and to what it is progressing toward, is 
of much greater importance. If the neighborhood 
is improving not only in material values but in gen- 
eral respectability ; if the club or society or associa- 
tion has had a listing that gives assurance of whole- 
some betterment as the years go on; if the church 
believes and practices doctrines that are truly Chris- 
tian rather than mostly pagan ; if the political party 
has looked to the welfare of all rather than to that 
of certain classes ; if the grade of social association 
that one aspires to is characterized by good sense 
and real companionship ; — then will one's life in its 
every aspect be bettered, and progressed on its way 
as wholesomely and as successfully as primarily an- 
ticipated. Such a prudential ordering of one's life 
is legitimate in the main, and should enter into one's 
expectations from the beginning. 

But there are certain qualifying limitations that 
should be equally respected and allowed to have due 
weight. For instance, it is seldom productive of 
success to be led on to excessive expenditures, no 
matter what the pressure, unless the character of 
the enterprise promises with greater surety than 



HELPFUL ASSOCIATIONS 343 

usual an increase of income that will warrant them. 
Even then there is usually such a large element of 
speculation, that the risks are comparatively great 
and the permanent benefit equally small. Trying 
to get into and to keep in circles that do not allow 
one to respect one's own self or prospects is a poor 
business, at best. It almost, perhaps always, in- 
variably follows that decline and danger and ad- 
versity and disappointment overtake the aspirant 
before he reaches his goal. Three from two never 
leaves a balance in the social or any other realm. 

Much less is it worth while to attempt to put 
oneself where health and the ordinary daily duties 
are likely to be seriously interfered with. After 
all is said, it is these commonplace matters that 
tell for satisfaction in the long run. Children 
neglected or given false notions, work neglected or 
miscalculated and spoiled, or wrongly adjusted to 
the extra demands of the " advanced " position — 
these are sure to hinder the real progress desired, 
if not at once then not far ahead. Many a man 
or woman prematurely breaks down in health, not 
from overwork as is so often said, but from too much 
and too strenuous society added thereto. It is 
mostly selfish fools that set the pace in social direc- 
tions, and it is quite the same sort of fools that un- 
reasonably attempt to keep up with them. Setting 
one's own pace is as divine a calling as any other. 
Keeping to it persistently is equally divine in almost 
every instance. 

Especially should one have due regard to one's 
constitutional idiosyncrasies, especially his weak- 
nesses and perverse tendencies. A man of forty 



344 HIGHER LIVING 

once told me he dare not go past an open saloon 
door because of the terrible craving for drink that 
was liable to be aroused by so doing. In explana- 
tion of this he said that his father had always been 
a moderate drinker from boyhood on, and that his 
grandfather had been the same ! I once saw at a 
club a group of college boys clustered about the 
punch-bowl. It was as easy to see which ones took 
to it " like ducks to the water," as it was to see 
which ones would have to learn how before they 
could really like alcoholic stimulation under any 
conditions. Of all the follies that contribute to the 
undesirability of so many social cliques, clubs and 
societies, the one of offering promiscuously under 
such pressure the cup that inebriates and in the 
end does not cheer, is the worst. And so it may 
be said of gambling, excessive devotion to games, 
certain forms of conversation, and reckless disre- 
gard for personal safety, in general. The circle 
that is not truly respectable in all these respects, is 
always dangerous to him of fragile constitution, 
easily diverted tendencies, or moral weaknesses of 
any sort. 

No circle should be considered attractive that 
does not promise to help one in the realization of 
the ulterior object of his life. In this respect, it 
never pays to grasp at a fascinating but tempo- 
rary gain, and let go the main chance as prom- 
ised or indicated by the long years ahead. It 
is an easy matter thus to spoil absolutely one's 
prospect for advancement in the direction that 
up to the moment has seemed the right one. To 
be deflected from the main lines of one's growth 



HELPFUL ASSOCIATIONS 345 

by influences that are but trivial and shortsighted, 
is indeed to sell oneself for the mess of pottage 
that is likely to scald or grow stale. This ap- 
plies to every one of the chief affairs of life. If one 
is to succeed in business, he should keep at some 
particular one until he becomes overwhelmingly con- 
vinced that a change would be advantageous. So in 
politics, church clubs and associations, generally. 
Keep at it is well; keep to it is often the one cer- 
tainty of success. The business or calling, the 
different circles, social, religious, political, that one 
chooses rather early, especially if approved by a re- 
spectable amount of intelligence and a decent regard 
to conscience, can seldom be changed later on for 
anything that can assure better results in the end. 
Put into the things you are doing, and into the 
associations you have first chosen, the vitality, the 
probity, the vivacity, the sincerity, that they ought 
to deserve, and you will as naturally gravitate to 
your real place, and as naturally reap your de- 
served rewards, almost as surely in one place as an- 
other. The spirit whose office in life is not to see 
how much it can get out of others so much as 
to give all it can to assure their prosperity is as 
sure of success in associated lines as is possible in 
this world. To such an one every " ripple of the 
stream of tendency " is sure to bring something of 
the finer associations of prosperity of both body 
and soul. 

And this is the object to be gained from all our 
aspiration and endeavor — an object that includes 
fitness for desirable heavenly as well as earthly 
places, that includes every possible enhancement of 



346 HIGHER LIVING 

ability and happiness and prospect that is legiti- 
mately our due. Sir Leslie Stephen says, " Men 
do become commonplace and reasonable as they 
grow older," and it is to such that many of the am- 
bitions and strains of early life appear only to have 
been over-estimated and wrongly exercised. Life 
should be so lived in every connection that the ulti- 
mate achievement and effect shall commend itself 
when the end is neared and hope reaches exclusively 
to the beyond. Blessed hope that is the natural, the 
divine, outcome of such a well-ordered life! Blessed 
later years that can look back and commend unre- 
servedly the ambitions and efforts of the earlier 
ones ! Blessed earlier years that have the good 
sense, the intelligence, the clarity of spirit that en- 
able them so to project the future that all that is 
ever realized is thus commended! This is the ideal 
end, this the direction to which the whole of one's 
life should be attuned. In such a course lies all that 
is really worth while and all that is really worth 
achieving in this life. Upon each step of it, an- 
gels of forbearance and forgiveness and assurance 
gladly attend. At the end they rejoice exceedingly. 



CHAPTER XXVI 
OUR HOME 



What is a home? It is a place made sacred by happy 
associations; it is comfort, safety, a retreat from outside 
trouble; it is a region where peace shall always abide. 
Such a home every family needs. j. f. clarke 

The one thing for men, who, like you and I, stand 
pretty much alone, and have a good deal of fighting to 
do in the world, is to have light and warmth, and confi- 
dence within the four walls of home. 

T. H. HUXLEY TO ERNST HAECKEL 

Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house 
a world; and beyond its world a heaven. . . . Build, 
therefore, your own world. ... As when summer comes 
from the south, the snow banks melt, and the face of 
the earth becomes green before it, so shall the achieving 
spirit create its associates along its path, and carry with 
it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; 
it shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise dis- 
course and heroic acts around its way. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Anne's room was more like summer. At her lattice 
the woodbine rustled its leaves glossed with dew, the 
moonlight was warm and mellow and a bird's shadow 
fluttered for a moment in the calender lattice set like 
a mosaic on the floor. There was a light step on the 
path, and something like a quail's whistle broke the 
silence; a tuft of leaves tossed in at the casement, fell 
on the floor. "There's rosemary — that's a remem- 
brance, pity you, love, remember." c. w. stoddard 



CHAPTER XXVI 
OUR HOME 

The first crossing of the threshold — " Our 
Threshold " — into the home — " Our home " ! Was 
ever deeper interest, happier moment or sweeter sat- 
isfaction, in all the history of man? Be its floors 
and walls bare and rooms small and very empty, 
nevertheless, with what scanning and planning and 
trying, this and that, here and there, to see if the 
Home Spirit may not be prevailed upon to enter 
and prove again if glowing anticipation, out of 
meagerness, genius-like, may not amplify unto sat- 
isfaction, and, through the idealized atmosphere if 
none other, make it the expression of a luxury, such 
only as the heart's first realization can possibly 
comprehend ! 

Nor need it be supposed that this pure joy may 
be either lowly or shallow. Many a couple has ex- 
perienced it and survived not only to move up to so- 
called " better things," but to remember with a 
touch of deepest pathos, that no other home has been 
or ever can be so interesting as was the simple, spare, 
first one, entered for the first time, hand in hand 
with child-like confidence, yet with fullest prophetic 
sense of prosperity. Nor need anyone with health 
and intelligence hesitate for a moment to enter upon 

the making of such a simple home. To be sure, it 

349 



350 HIGHER LIVING 

may at first have but the vital germ of home — love. 
Yet, in it none the less surely may likewise be all 
the elements — fire, table, chairs, food, couch, 
books, hope, work, joy, possibly sorrow — that are 
needed for the true realization of the perfect home. 
And out of these elements, inexpensive necessarily, 
inartistic though they may seem, few and inadequate, 
but of course to be enlarged upon as time encour- 
ages, is to come the experience, which, later on, shall 
make it possible to arrange ampler furnishings into 
more presentable and more comfortable array. 
Shall we slightingly regard these beginnings, so un- 
pretentious, so earnest, so full of potency? Rather, 
let us be thankful that Providence is often kind 
enough to let human nature thus early have just this 
lowly means of learning and enjoying so much, and 
then later of growing so truly, in consequence. 
Often it would be most pitiful were this denied ; often 
life is totally shipwrecked because of having at first 
undertaken something more complex, with inade- 
quate training in simpler households. The newly- 
married couple who can take " two rooms," and, 
with their few necessary articles and one " article 
of luxury," whatever it may be, so order them that 
" home " comes to be plainly written all over its 
every part, is more to be envied than all the palace 
owners who can only at best live in w establishments." 
Vain emulation of artificial grandeur is but a poor 
substitute for the sweet pride that looks upon its 
own, if ever so little, and feels itself pulsing freely 
with the common life of humanity. And what 
sweeter, purer, more hopeful pride than that with 
which an intelligent, properly schooled, rightly ideal- 



OUR HOME 351 

ized young housewife welcomes her truly ennobled, 
worthy companion to their first home ! Her smile 
gives a glow to its every element ; his quiet accept- 
ance crowns everything with a glory in return that 
is often denied to those who are called " more for- 
tunate." 

But the making of every home does not and need 
not begin in such a humble manner, at all. More 
and more frequently, however, does this make the 
problem of home-making much more tryingly com- 
plex, if not utterly insolvable. The fathers and 
mothers, although having themselves possibly come 
up through all the steps from humble beginnings that 
have led to prosperity in the end, have, nevertheless, 
not been able to impart the respective values of their 
experience to the otherwise educated and disciplined 
wants of their children. Nor has common school, 
nor the finishing school including the college, pre- 
pared these for any such undertakings as now pre- 
sent themselves. All at once, the vital difference be- 
tween living in parental homes and ordering one's 
own is realized, often as painfully as distractingly. 
Blunders which " lower down " are unheard of hap- 
pen, perplexities almost unceasingly sometimes rasp 
sensitive dispositions to their keenest edge; weari- 
some emulation proves to be a poor substitute for 
simple cooking and keeping everything clean; and 
it is found that " society " does not take the place 
of home and mutual fellowship in providing perma- 
nent and satisfactory joy. The wonder is, that 
parents will let their children reach the point where 
they must necessarily assume the new responsibility 
with any such lack of knowledge, skill and personal 



852 HIGHER LIVING 

devotion, as is now so often found. Do not blame 
the poor fledglings, who, try their best, can mostly 
but flounder in waters so shallow that they are kept 
perpetually muddied by their efforts. Rather, pity 
them deeply, extend to them a skillful hand of help, 
and, behind the curtain, resolve that henceforth par- 
ental care shall be made always and surely to in- 
clude the adequate fitting of every young life for 
the positions and tasks in any sort of new home to 
which it is destined. 

One of the greatest difficulties to be overcome for 
wealthy home-beginners, is the inborn, inbred, im- 
perative vanity, which is so difficult to manage, no 
matter what may be its interference with success. 
To unduly strive to be equal to somebody else, to 
receive and entertain as many and as important ones 
as others, to go where they do, or better, to boast of 
as good and better lines of acquaintance and fa- 
miliars ; — to what straining of body and mind does 
not all this lead, and to what shoals of danger and 
distraction, besides ! And yet, how little real satis- 
faction may and does it all bring. Instead, and be- 
fore very long in many cases, what cloying inanity, 
depressing weariness, chill misanthropy, awful sense 
of emptiness and death, are pretty sure to come in 
its place. No more pathetic sight is there on earth, 
than the ybungerly couple who have strenuously yet 
unsuccessful^ tried to keep pace with all these heavy 
artificial demands, made upon them as senselessly 
as persistently by others, who, in turn, are even 
more weary, cold, and empty than themselves. A 
vicious circle of increasing failure is thus projected, 
certainly ; and often, with no suitable loop-hole for 



OUR HOME 353 

tangential escape. It would seem as though the 
social as well as domestic world would with all its 
might revolt at this senseless business and decree and 
practice something better. Evidently, the " moral 
question " involved in this misapplication of energy, 
is frequently too deeply obscured to be very avail- 
able for needful correction, and the end is not yet. 

Yet wealth, be it never so great, need not stifle the 
home. Nor can wealth any more than poverty as 
such make a home. Any bird upon any branch 
makes its own home as it has need. So may any 
human being make a home out of much or little, and 
just according to its need. But to do this requires 
that there shall be a right motive to predetermine 
that effort shall be made in a direction nearer and 
nearer to some appropriate ideal; and then, that 
there shall be power to criticize oneself and one's 
work, at every step. Having these important ele- 
ments of the successful home-maker, the home itself 
not only becomes a thing of comfort and beauty, but 
a realm in which Higher Living and permanent hap- 
piness conspicuously develop and persist. Said 
James Mott, to his newly-married son and his bride, 
" I consider this a critical moment in your lives, my 
endeared James and Lucretia, just, as it were, set- 
ting out in life. How important that you set out 
right, and with correct views." Simply to look 
upon the portraits of James and Lucretia Mott is 
to see how truly this had been so in their own case, 
and be led to believe that in the case of other people, 
it may altogether more often than not be equally 
true. 

It may be premised that the prosperity of the 



354 HIGHER LIVING 

new home will depend largely upon the attitude 
which its members educate themselves to assume to- 
wards life and its various possibilities, and towards 
the ambitions that grow out of this. If life is com- 
monly thought of as a goodly gift and choice pos- 
session, to be carefully protected and discreetly con- 
served; if length of days, health of mind and body, 
righteousness of conduct, and a wholesome spiritual 
tone, are regarded of supreme worth; then will pur- 
pose and effort and result correspond, even though 
at times other things may seem to be of equal or 
greater importance. On the other hand, if rapid 
pace, sensuous enjoyment, success at any cost, and 
sufficient for the day without much regard for the 
future, be uppermost in mind, then will the house- 
hold status grow to be of the lower order. In 
either case, the dominant note is apt to be struck 
soon after the new home is first entered. 

That this note should be full of harmony, 
strength, sweetness and lasting quality, is self-evi- 
dent. The difficulty consists in determining before 
experience teaches just what will surely conduce to 
this. It is not a sinister reflection to say, that 
young people have not acquired and consequently do 
not possess very many data upon which to decide 
such matters ; but it may be a reflection as severe as 
it is truthful to say, that, they all too often seem 
not to care to learn just what will timely help them. 
The egotistic sufficiency of ever so bright young 
manhood and young womanhood is not quite the 
equivalent of the actual knowledge of less self-asser- 
tive older persons, who have had prolonged experi- 
ence of married life and home building. On the 



OUR HOME 355 

other hand, experience itself does not help some 
people, no matter what their age. Indeed, some of 
the poorest advice ever given to those who need it 
comes from older people who seem to have no fac- 
ulty for learning by experience, much less for im- 
parting the results of right experience to others. 

If, however, we seriously turn to experience as 
realized in our own lives and as observed in others, 
and then consider the generalizations which may le- 
gitimately be derived therefrom, we soon note that 
both the experience and the observation make it im- 
perative to advise, first, that none other than the 
young people themselves should ever be expected to 
assume direction of their home, and that this ar- 
rangement should continue permanently, or, at least, 
until gross failure makes some other arrangement 
equally imperative. No other one, parent, grand- 
parent, friend, enemy, servant, ecclesiast, or instruc- 
tor, should for any length of time be allowed to go 
further than merely to offer suggestions or, possi- 
bly, partially to provide necessary means. The 
choice of the home, its furnishing and arrange- 
ment thereafter, and the selection of those who are 
to be its inmates, should remain absolutely with those 
who are primarily responsible for its daily integrity. 
But this does not, on their part, preclude honest 
listening to good instruction, or grateful acceptance 
of timely help, or eventually profiting by all that 
well-meaning concern on the part of others may af- 
ford. Listen and learn, accept and profit, of 
course; but always with the distinct understanding 
that no one else shall be allowed to go farther, or 
to any extent be responsible for its application. 



356 HIGHER LIVING 

Meddling, if ever so well-meant, is very apt to prove 
to be mussing, in the end. 

Young home-builders should see to it that they 
manage matters so that they will automatically be 
protected from every sort of obtrusive, detrimental 
influences, whether familiar or distant, private or 
public. Inasmuch as the architecture of the home 
is a matter of supreme concern to two people and 
their children only, it should be their most serious 
business to keep each step in its realization as pure 
and prophetic of success as possible. While the 
home may safely be hospitable, often to a wide de- 
gree, it yet should always be safeguarded with the 
care that will prevent untoward influences from un- 
suspectingly creeping in. Especially is this needed 
in the formative period of the first few years, dur- 
ing which the young natures have not as yet quite 
found their true planes of dispositional and other 
adaptation. A wrong influence admitted here, may 
mean untold perplexity and suffering forever after. 
" My house my castle is," is a sentiment, respect 
for which should effectually forbid any such intru- 
sion. 

Nothing can be more satisfactory, as the years 
develop the possibilities of the home, than to find 
that the fellowship of good friends and true has 
successfully and in goodly measure been added to 
its treasures. To feel that out there, in the wider 
world, are people who have known the young home- 
builders from the beginning and who still love them 
and care to visit them, constitutes a sense of reality 
and worth-whileness which all else fails to do. As 
one looks back upon the noble men and the dear 



OUR HOME 357 

women who have successively or together lighted up 
the hearth with the brightness that shines alone 
from friendship's countenance, one realizes that not 
only have these made life very chiefly worth while, 
but that, had the number been greater, so much the 
more worth-while would life and all its fortunes have 
been. A golden rosary of tried and true friends is 
goodly to think upon, as well as by which to check 
off the steps towards one's highest self-realization. 
To begin home life, then, with this ever in view, that, 
as real friend after real friend shall be admitted to 
the circle, they shall be held with the sacred close- 
ness which no ill-fortune shall be allowed to imperil, 
may well constitute an ambition that can be trusted 
to bring to earthly souls some of their deepest sat- 
isfactions. At any rate, the cultivation of these 
higher friendships is itself such a delightful exercise 
in Higher Living, that it is a pity that it should 
ever be neglected or bungled. 

True home-building is also as much a result of 
" progressive industry of the mind," as is any other 
thing worth doing; and such industry may prom- 
isingly be directed toward choosing the mutual ele- 
ments which shall not only be temporarily pleasing, 
but permanently satisfactory. In many homes, 
even of the rich, there is everything that may stimu- 
late a passing interest, but very little indeed that 
can be enjoyed permanently. Thus the different 
pieces of furniture, although expensive and perhaps 
artistic, may mean so little, that even their sale or 
destruction would cause no regret. So, too, with 
the pictures on the walls, which, if perhaps costty, 
are yet often so inartistic that a mere photograph 



358 HIGHER LIVING 

of some bit of true art would serve a much better 
purpose. In respect of both pictures and furni- 
ture, how much more serviceable are a few choice 
representations of true art and comfortable use, se- 
lected, perhaps, only at rare intervals; and how 
much more valuable do all such become as age ad- 
vances, than if hurriedly and indifferently selected 
all at once ! " And isn't it better to buy little by 
little," asks a character in one of Charles Dudley 
Warner's books, " enjoying every new object as 
you get it and assimilating each article to your 
household life and making the home a harmonious 
expression of your own taste? " Again, as to books, 
one has but to look at the shelves, few or many, 
which the ordinary home offers, to see how little 
judgment either as to authors or editions has been 
exercised and how little real satisfaction can ever 
be realized. And yet, as already seen, how super- 
latively important it is that proper books, in read- 
able, illustrated editions, and carefully selected with 
respect to the personal and household needs, should 
be thought of, from the first. Furniture, pictures 
and books should be chosen as friends are chosen, 
to be choice friends, companions, — lovers, if you 
will, — throughout all time. What these will do for 
the higher life and happiness of all of the inmates, 
only those thoroughly know who have from time to 
time exerted themselves in this upbuilding way, and 
maybe have pinched their other outlays in order that 
the chosen object might become a permanent pos- 
session. Much like the love one bears toward a 
choice friend in the flesh, is the feeling that one ulti- 



OUR HOME 359 

mately develops toward all such choice inanimate 
members of the home. 

Any home, any person, may consider itself com- 
paratively safe and prosperous that is continuously 
dominated by a deep sense of cheer and courage. 
This is the psychological law in accordance with 
which we eventually direct the deeper tides of our be- 
ing into corresponding conduct. If the dominant 
emotional tone of the home be perpetually low and 
warring, it is very certain that sooner or later its 
character will present similar aspects. Fear and de- 
pression should always be looked upon as timely 
warnings of disorder later on, and as quickly heeded 
and peremptorily dismissed as practicable. But the 
opposite, the courage which shrinks not, and the joy- 
ous anticipation of life which admits of no real fail- 
ure, the optimism, in fact, which, as has been said, 
" solves the question by affirming that evil is the nec- 
essary antecedent of good " — what stimulating as- 
surance of ultimate success and happiness are in- 
herent in this, from beginning to end ! In this re- 
spect, the great burdens of life — working for wages 
or mutual interests ; rectifying the past and provid- 
ing for the future, and for community as well as for 
private interests ; bearing and nurturing children, 
supporting old age, attending to patriotic and all 
other public duties ; — all these are carried as if with 
wings, and on the way upward even unto the heaven 
itself! Where this good sense and intelligence serve, 
there is safety both for the home and its people. 
And the fine glow of hopeful determination that re- 
sults from this is worth all the clouds in all the skies. 



360 HIGHER LIVING 

In such a glow, Higher Living not only finds inspira- 
tion but also some of its happiest realizations ; and 
the home that is permanently lighted by it radiates 
to all its fellows an influence effulgent and beneficent. 



CHAPTER XXVII 
THE GREATER CONTACTS 



Who mines or who wins the prize? 

Go, lose or conquer as you can; 
But if you fail, or if you rise, 

Be each, pray God, a gentleman. 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 

This above all: to thine own self be true 
And it must follow, as the night the day, 
Thou canst not then be false to any man. 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out 
what kind of work he is to do in this universe. 

THOMAS CARLYLE 

Man's first directed effort accomplishes a sort of 
dream, while God is the sole worker of realities. 

HAWTHORNE 

The duty is to enter the work of party activity and 
help to make the party organization what it ought to 
be. The duty rests upon each intelligent citizen in his 
own community to incite the voters of the party he be- 
lieves in to take charge of their own affairs, and to sub- 
stitute party organization and party leadership which 
is really representative of them in place of the party 
organization and the party leadership which are main- 
tained by the distribution of office for the sake of office. 

ELIHU ROOT 

Youth is the only time 
To think and to decide on a great course ; 
Manhood with action follows ; but 'tis dreary 
To have to alter our whole life in age — 
The time past, the strength gone. 

ROBERT BROWNING 



CHAPTER XXVII 
THE GREATER CONTACTS 

It is difficult for anyone now-a-days to escape the 
greater contacts with the world, if he wills. So 
wide if not universal is the tendenc}^ for all the world 
to move about, that it is almost impossible to find a 
spot that will not be intruded upon, sooner or later. 
The would-be recluse must learn to be content with 
the crowd even while he is not a part of it. The 
crowd itself is not certain that withdrawal from con- 
tact with it is the better way for anyone, and this 
is becoming more and more the reigning thought 
and practice of the better portion of the world. At 
the present rate, the solitary for any reason will soon 
be a thing of the past, and rightly so. It is not good 
to be alone, except to do work that requires freedom 
from distraction and interruption. 

Mankind does not as a rule grow to its best when 
too exclusively isolated from the common contacts 
with other lives. Only exceptionally does a Thoreau 
or a Bronte or a Guy on prove it otherwise. The 
most of us live our best, think our best, and do our 
best, when daily stimulated and corrected and ac- 
cepted or rejected by our fellows. In this way so- 
ciet} 7 in its larger sense is the one helper of most con- 
cern. It contributes freely to the development of 
its members ; it gets its compensation from the de- 
velopment which it promotes and conserves. Thus 

363 



364 HIGHER LIVING 

it is that society and individuals in turn forcefully 
support each other for good or ill. 

Hence it always becomes a matter of supreme im- 
portance whenever we choose to come into contact 
with men and women individually or collectively, even 
for the shortest time or the simplest purpose. It 
matters much more, also, whether we ally ourselves 
permanently with a certain party, or church, or 
school, or clique, or family, or with some other. If 
the tone of our greater associations with the world 
is high and broad and deep and sweet and upward 
moving, then will we respond to it little by little in 
such a way that perhaps our entire natural dispo- 
sition and tendency will become, in the end, made 
over for the better. If not this, then will we as 
surely be influenced more or less definitely for the 
worse. 

In the neighborhood one should try to live so that 
all the neighbors shall be rightly helped and not 
harmed. Oftentimes our own safety as well as that 
of our loved ones depends absolutely upon the part 
we ourselves take in maintaining needed sanitation 
and moral purity and spiritual nobleness in the 
neighborhood. Small-pox next door may well 
frighten us seriously enough, and reasonably; but a 
vicious man or woman or youth may be much more 
dangerous, while a low-minded, grubbing, pessimistic 
grouch, although perfectly respectable, may be the 
worst curse of all. It is thus worth while, many 
times, to strive to have one's contact with the neigh- 
borhood distinctly and impressively generous and 
uplifting and intelligent. It is one of the very best 
ways to promote one's own undying prosperity. 



THE GREATER CONTACTS 365 

And so it is with the church one becomes a member 
of. There are religious organizations and services 
that serve but to choke every bit of spiritual vitality 
out of one, and offer little that is wholesome in re- 
turn. They hang a millstone about the neck and 
drag one down unceasingly, until nothing but arid 
unbelief results. Keep away from such a church, no 
matter what its pretentions or claims, as from the 
evil one himself. One can never be sure of the real 
object that is worshipped in such a church, in place 
of the living God. Such a church may be known by 
its fruits, if only one courageously scans it to see 
what its fruits are. Undoubtedly they will look well ; 
but it is wise to take account of the worm-holes that 
may show on the opposite side. 

Yes, join a church that is a church, that seeks 
always to be of supreme use, that has high and noble 
and fine ideas to guide it, and has large-minded deep- 
souled men and women to promote and conserve its 
fortunes. Be sure it is an organization that will 
admit of your being yourself and at your best, and 
that will inspire you to do your best every day in 
the week. Be sure it is a church that thinks more 
of the needs of those outside than it does of its own 
needs. Be sure it is a real light in the world — a 
proper continuation of the Light that needs to be 
seen of everybody. Be sure you can help to keep 
its light trimmed and burning as a sacred privilege, 
and with your whole soul. Be sure it offers services 
and doctrines that commend themselves to your best 
judgment as well as conscience. Be sure it can en- 
list your whole heart unceasingly in its worship and 
its ministries. Be sure you can make it not onty 



366 HIGHER LIVING 

your church but worthy of its being everybody's 
church. Here is one of the broader contacts with 
the world where one is naturally lifted to heaven or 
depressed to hell. Nothing on earth is more fateful 
than the church to which one belongs. It either 
robs one of one's birthright or crowns one with 
glory. It goes without saying, that everybody 
should be a member of a church of some kind, if it 
be one with but one other member, who is yet sincere, 
earnest and devoted. It is time to resolve that 
quackery in church life shall be left to its own de- 
vices. 

We have to acknowledge that this is the age of 
" clubs " and other social groups of every sort, and 
should attempt soberly and decently to be of them, 
to some extent, anyway. Yet what an infinite possi- 
bility for mistake there is here. I once read an obit- 
uary of a man who was said to have belonged to 
forty-three clubs ! Yet no one ever knew of his 
being the better for it — and he left his dependents 
in meager circumstances. I have known women to 
spend so much time and energy at their card clubs 
that they were good for little else, and in time to 
become not satisfactorily good even at their games. 
I have seen men sit in their clubs hour after hour 
and do nothing except drink cocktails and talk silli- 
ness. Even it is creditably reported that some of 
the more celebrated clubs have been given to con- 
versation chiefly about the merits of different vin- 
tages. The reputation of various " sewing-socie- 
ties," guilds and other benevolent associations for 
gossip is notorious, to say the least. So it may be 
readily granted that not every club or clique, even 



THE GREATER CONTACTS 367 

when known by the most dignified name, is surely a 
place where one's best interests are helped on or even 
safe. Hence discrimination in choosing these theo- 
retical helps, yet often practical hindrances, is in- 
dispensable. One must if possible see through the 
outside glitter to the actual material that he is sure 
to rub against when once inside. In a club, quality 
is everything ; mere quantity, especially of the popu- 
lar kind, may prove to be unexpectedly risky. 

A club should have an object that is worthy, and 
should maintain the pursuit of this object without 
serious deviation. It may be for mere sociability, 
and this is surely as worthy an object as any other, 
providing the sociability is real and not spurious. 
Spurious sociability is the bane of the club-room, 
and is usually founded on artificial standards. It is 
not often that anything is thought of or said under 
the glow of intoxicants that compares with the think- 
ing and sayings of sober persons, notwithstanding 
the whole world seems to believe to the contrary. 
Maudlin disgusting sentimentalisms, or vulgar wit, 
or nast}' stories, or bumptious politics, or plati- 
tudinous rambling discourses of art or literature, 
or maybe superficial and cowardly religious talk — 
these are not elements of the sociability that counts, 
in the long run, except down the scale toward ulti- 
mate disintegration. Yet, much of the so-called 
" sociability " of social groups everywhere may be 
noted to be rather exclusively of this nature ; when 
not this, then of the nature of the gossip and scandal 
and back-biting that kills all true sociability, and, 
where voluntarily allowed, well deserves to. 

The fact is, no club can be wholesome in its re- 



368 HIGHER LIVING 

suits, if it is not made up of a preponderance, at 
least, of reliable members. Sloppy, showy, boister- 
ous, unstable individuals cannot make a good club, 
try as they may. Yet in every club, as in every 
other right place, these are the people — the heed- 
less, aggressive, untidy of speech and conduct, — 
who are apt to set the pace, if the better elements 
are not the stronger and eternally watchful, and 
maintain the proper gait with undeviating scrupu- 
lousness. These better elements of a club are known 
to be such at home, in business and politics, every- 
where, as well as in the clubs to which they belong. 
In any place, one need not be a snob rationally to 
ally oneself with these rather than the worse ele- 
ments. In a club all are supposably equal; prac- 
tically, one has to discriminate, and should do it un- 
flinchingty. 

A club that is really worth belonging to, especially 
for social purposes, is one where snobbery is un- 
known, where mutual good-feeling prevails, where 
the conversation is clean, intelligent and rational, 
no matter how entertaining, where conduct is cir- 
cumspect and useful, where sociability rather than 
gluttony is uppermost, where the games are played 
for the fun there is in them, and not for money, 
where in fact nothing or little is said and done that 
leaves a bad after-taste or dubious retrospection. 
Such a club rationally used and at proper hours is 
nothing but a blessing to everyone of its members. 
The culture that comes from such an association is 
the real thing, and like good wine needs no " bush " 
to commend it. Some of the most instructive and en- 
tertaining and upbuilding times I have ever known 



THE GREATER CONTACTS 869 

have been within the precincts of such companion- 
ship. Especially have I noted the benefit to be de- 
rived from certain smaller circles, where the con- 
versation is general and the doings equally so. A 
certain " Shakespeare Club " in my earlier days, and 
a similar " Browning Club " later on, were of this 
nature, and of inestimable benefit and satisfaction. 
A " Study Club " of eight members only, where 
" original " papers and " erudite " discussions were 
the order, and a " Twenty Club " composed mostly 
of those interested in theological and ethical sub- 
jects, could not have been excelled, so far as perma- 
nent benefit was concerned. So it is still possible 
to organize and carry on a club that is really worth 
while, although custom seems chiefly to think it 
otherwise. 

As for political clubs and parties, one is of course 
governed by his predilections and reasonings with 
reference to the political needs of his neighborhood, 
state or country. Here there is less freedom of 
choice than with respect to social clubs. Here, also, 
it is more difficult to escape the blighting effects of 
association with ambitious, low-bred and often vi- 
ciously shrewd exploiters, who know no purpose in 
life but to work everybody for their own gain. Yet 
one should here as elsewhere be so much of a man 
among men, that, to this extent at least, the atmos- 
phere of politics is cleared and the real purposes and 
practices of the chosen party kept at the front. 
It really would seem as if politics was a game that 
anyone could play ; but like every other enterprise, 
the requirements for succeeding are definite and ex- 
acting. To be a successful politician, one must be 



370 HIGHER LIVING 

intuitively, keenly, observant and polite, must be- 
gin early in life and under shrewd workers, must 
be willing to give unlimited time and as much money 
as possible, must be determined to succeed, and must 
learn to take temporary defeat with such a grace 
that it will always reveal actual strength and prom- 
ise nothing but this later on. Only occasionally 
does one happen to succeed on the wave of some 
popular movement that for the time being is in the 
ascendant. Success is generally bought by the devo- 
tion and drudgery that involves one's whole being 
and may tend to prostitute it disastrously on the 
way. Of course, if the aspirant is unusually large- 
minded, noble, and far-seeing and persistently active, 
he may be able to avoid this and command success, 
as well. But the successful politician knows well 
enough that this is not the common way, and does 
not rely upon it, save to influence the public favor- 
ably. How far unscrupulousness and misrepresen- 
tation may go in any particular strife, is a problem 
that many fail to solve; likewise, with reference to 
bu}dng and trading votes. There is a Nemesis, how- 
ever, that often frustrates the success of such work- 
ers mercilessly. The whole practice of unscrupu- 
lousness and venality in politics is one that fair- 
minded men and women should frown upon, and en- 
deavor with all their might to punish and do away 
with. The buying of votes at so much per head, the 
trading of votes in legislative halls, the " pairing " 
of votes even in our " dignified " national Congress, 
is but a part of a system that substitutes for real 
understanding of serious questions and due attention 
thereto, the accommodating ignorance, shirking, and 



THE GREATER CONTACTS 371 

negligence that should have little or no place in the 
life of him who has been intrusted with public inter- 
ests. Politics might be one of the most useful, inter- 
esting and ennobling pursuits known; as it is, one 
should hesitate long before entering the political field, 
to any exclusive extent. 

Yet the best citizenship requires that the best citi- 
zens actually cultivate the very field that is so full of 
snags and briers. It is owing to the fact that they 
do not more generally do this that politics has become 
so forbidding and is left to professionals so exclu- 
sively. It is difficult and disagreeable for decent 
people to give the time and do the things that suc- 
cess requires at the hands of political workers. The 
professional politician is " on the job " year in and 
year out and every moment in the year ; the true citi- 
zen has other matters to attend to and that are more 
to his taste and in his line. The politician can stop 
at no sort of trickery or quackery ; the citizen would 
advise and act honorably and decently at all times. 
The politician usually cares very little for the inter- 
ests of everyone, so that he and his clique are bene- 
fited ; the citizen seeks to secure the success that may 
be shared in by all. The politician condescends to 
anything that gives promise of success ; the citizen 
cannot stoop to this level and remain himself. The 
line between the politician and the citizen is thus 
sharply drawn at every point; the politician bosses 
and buys — the citizen serves and leads. Nothing 
can be more seriously a duty than to be a true citi- 
zen and endeavor to lead the public to higher places 
political and to better results in statescraft. It goes 
without saying, that everyone should thus far, at 



372 HIGHER LIVING 

least, enter the political field and play the game as 
best he can. The pseudo-citizenship of the ordinary 
politician should be transcended by the real citizen- 
ship that places everybody above the few, integrity 
above quackery. At any rate, the interests of 
Higher Living all require this, and probably nothing 
can more effectually promote these in the layman, 
than the substitution of the better politics for the 
faulty, the honorable worker for the trickster. 

Every day, almost every hour, men are forced to 
come into contact with the business world, and are 
built up or torn down correspondingly. Some men 
from their first trade in jack-knives at school until 
the last stroke of anything always see an advantage, 
take it, and prosper ; the greater number do not have 
such clear sight and more frequently blunder and 
lose, than otherwise. Some are able to keep cheer- 
ful and hopeful, and to grow more skilful no matter 
what kind of success they have ; others become over- 
elated with success and unreasonably despondent if 
not successful. Almost every successful man works 
too many hours and with too great tension; a large 
minority dawdle and poke along and blame everybody 
but themselves for their " hard luck." Some never 
lose faith in themselves or in the majority of their 
fellows ; their neighbors get to look upon everybody 
else but themselves as scamps and robbers and envi- 
able favorites of Dame Fortune. 

Contact with the business world ought to be a safe 
and assuring and prosperous one much more fre- 
quently than it is. The reasons why it is not so are 
so apparent that it would seem as if they would be 
more commonly noted and needed than they are, by 



THE GREATER CONTACTS 57S 

more men and women. These reasons in part, at 
least, are obviously as follows : 

1. Trying to take part in a portion of the business 
world for which one has no natural instinctive apti- 
tude. There are natural born traders, farmers, 
builders, promoters, inventors, bankers, doctors, min- 
isters, politicians, teachers, lawyers, agents, and 
every other trade or calling. These seldom fail, or, 
if they do fail, the blame is seldom theirs. 

£. Insufficient or wrong preparation for the busi- 
ness to be undertaken. Many are " educated " to be 
professional men who ought to be prepared for the 
farm or shop, instead. Many would engage in " po- 
lite " callings who are boors by nature and are to be 
nothing else. Others are kept at the heavier and 
grosser tasks throughout life who have instincts and 
capacities that would have assured them success in 
fields more appropriate to them. Others still match 
their verdant impulses to gain against the sharper 
who knows what they do not, and the result can be 
predicted with mathematical certainty. 

3. Not recognizing that not only " industry and 
perseverance lead to wealth," but that eternal vigil- 
ance and equal shrewdness are just as necessary in 
order to keep the avid world from getting it away 
from one. In this respect, the world, especially the 
dishonest world, never sleeps, and the unwary are 
caught before they know it. Knowing how to pros- 
per is one thing; knowing how to make prosperity 
a permanent thing is another. There never comes a 
time when what one can do for himself will be equally 
safe in the hands of another. Better mind thine own 
aim, and — shoot thine own gun. 



374 HIGHER LIVING 

4. Supposing that because one is truly moral and 
religious himself, that others who have the face and 
voice of reliability are necessarily capable and trust- 
worthy. Goodness, piety, fine trust are noble char- 
acteristics, undoubtedly, but even when genuine do 
not take the place of intelligence and devotion to life 
according to its own laws. Knowing how and doing 
it at the proper time and place is the Providence that 
one can really trust in the business world, and no 
other, whatever. Prayer never yet took the place of 
forethought, insight, and whole-sight. 

Now all these roads to unsuccess are paved with 
material that cuts and bruises and retards at almost 
every step. They cause not only physical distress, 
but mental and moral degeneracy of a like painful 
order. Hence it follows that to try to live a business 
life that doesn't belong to one is as silly as it is haz- 
ardous and disappointing. But it is all otherwise, 
when one does engage in what he is adapted to and 
has been properly prepared for. When this is the 
case, every day is a pleasant one, every new-year 
shows prosperity, and ever} 7 prayer is fraught with 
gratitude and faith. The body keeps well, the mind 
keeps clear, alert and energetic, the spirit keeps vital 
and growing — 

" God's in his heaven, 
And all's right with the world ! " 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
GETTING AND SPENDING 



We do not aspire to the laying up of much treasure. 
We are endeavoring to let our wants be as few as pos- 
sible, and I trust, as we " seek not great things " that 
all we really need will be supplied. 

LUCRETIA MOTT 

If the man of the house knew at what watch in the 
night the thief was coming, then he would have watched 
and not suffered his house to be broken through. 

BIBLE 

Whatsoever shall be wanting of that which thy love 
deserves my kindest affection I shall endeavor to supplie 
whilst I live and what I leave unsatisfied (as I never 
hope to be out of thy debt) I will sett over to Him who 
is able, and will recompense thee to the full. 

JOHN WINTHROP TO MARGARET TYNDALL 

The greedy notion that a man's life does consist, after 
all, in the abundance of the things that he possesseth, 
and that it is somehow or other more respectable and 
pious to be always at work making a larger living, than 
it is to lie on your back in the green pastures and beside 
the still waters, and thank God that you are alive. 

HENRY VAN DYKE 

Alas, in all of us this charlatan-element exists; and 
might be developed, were the temptation strong enough. 

THOMAS CARLYLE 

Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within 
the flower of pleasure which concealed it. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Just as there comes a sunbeam into every cottage, so 
comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every 
separate need. Nathaniel hawthorne 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
GETTING AND SPENDING 

It may seem daring to say, that as a rule people 
are better able to get money than they are to spend 
it properly. Yet everyday observation reveals this 
to be the case so generally, that rightly directed dis- 
cussion and improvement along this line cannot be 
amiss. Everyone is likely to be heard sometime to say, 
" Just give me a chance and I will know well enough 
how to spend many times the income I now have. It 
is easy enough to spend — the difficulty lies all with 
the getting." Yet, when perchance the increased 
income does come, how surely to the contrary does 
the course of the great majority show that, what 
they have chiefly needed has been, not more money to 
spend, but knowledge and judgment as to how to 
purchase and save and invest, that is, how properly 
to use their funds, whether small or great. The 
chances are that they will spend their money so un- 
wisely that loss and destruction and discomfort, 
rather than safety and upbuilding and reasonable 
ease of body and mind, will surely follow. They will 
be exceptional to the crowd, if sore disappointment 
and dire discomfort do not come to them as direct 
consequences of their lack of sense and taste, their 
paucity of judgment and skill. 

Observation shows that this is apt to result from 
too exclusively giving attention to the art of get- 

377 



378 HIGHER LIVING 

ling money, and not giving adequate attention to the 
equally important art of spending. Persons do not 
appear to think that, after all, it is the life they lead 
and not the number and sort of things they encumber 
themselves with, that counts in the long run. To 
have a large income at the expense of one's entire 
time and energy; to spend it in showy yet tasteless 
houses and furnishings ; to adorn one's person gaud- 
ily with expensive garments and jewels, when it will 
much more becomingly bear the simpler ones ; to rush 
to and fro and about the fashionable world, and be 
seen at a disproportionate series of mostly inane and 
usually unenjoyable functions; to outrival one's 
neighbors in splurge and conspicuousness ; — all this 
is not in the line of getting and spending that in the 
end counts for real happiness or true success. It 
surely is quackery so far as spending goes, and it 
may be owing to even worse than quackery, so far as 
the getting has been. If these " ambitious " persons 
assiduously cultivate nothing better than thistles 
from the beginning on, it naturally enough follows 
that they will not know how either to cultivate or 
harvest goodly figs, when fortune is thought to be 
more favorable to them. They are pretty sure to 
emulate the feats of the well-known animal that gulps 
down indiscriminately thistles as well as grass, and 
seems not to know or care for the difference, even 
when it has opportunity for choice. 

Every man worthy the name is naturally ambitious 
to improve the condition of himself and family. For 
this he gives his time and energy and skill unspar- 
ingty. In every way that commends itself to his 
judgment or conscience he attempts opportunely to 



GETTING AND SPENDING 379 

get more and more, and hopes with this mostly to 
effect this fundamental purpose of his life. Every 
conception of dutj' to him lies very close to how much 
he gets and how he is to spend it. Nor is this sort 
of ambition and devotion to be seriously discredited 
in respect of what it is really worth. A man cer- 
tainly should bend a reasonable proportion of all he 
is and can be toward both achievement of wealth and 
its satisfactory expenditure. He is rightly called a 
" poor stick," if he does not do this, and his de- 
pendents have a right to feel neglected, if he does 
not thus fulfil this common duty to them. He him- 
self need not expect to reap the better satisfactions 
of life, if he thus fails to attend to what is so obvi- 
ously his privilege as well as duty. 

But in this there should not be the mistake so fre- 
quently to be seen. No one is bound to earn more 
money than he reasonably can ; and this should be the 
thought that should be entertained even when work- 
ing the hardest and most devotedly. It is not reason- 
able to try to earn wages that by nature, capacity, 
or strength, one is not adapted to earning. It is 
not reasonable to work at that for which one has not 
had a suitable preparation. It is not reasonable, 
either, to labor during hours that should be given to 
something " more profitable " than the making of 
money, even. It is not reasonable permanently to 
wear oneself out, in order that the purse may grow 
heavier and one's pride the keener. Getting money 
should be a reasonable and sane business, kept well 
under control, and the process enjoyed quite as much 
as the having or the spending, if not the more. A 
man's work should be a pleasure to him, not a pain 



380 HIGHER LIVING 

that includes the consciousness of drudgery for sor- 
did ends. Reasonable getting of money does in itself 
assure many of the higher satisfactions of life, and 
rightly so. But this is a matter very different from 
laying all the stress on the getting, and none or very 
little on properly living while doing it. What mat- 
ters it if one gains the whole world and loses his soul, 
is writ large all over the industrial fabric of the day. 
It certainly is too bad that the genius of the twenti- 
eth century citizen should be so chiefly devoted to the 
unneeded and positively harmful perversions of time 
and devotion that are found so commonly in connec- 
tion with the processes of money getting. It all 
goes to show that there is something " rotten " in the 
economical fabric, and that it badly needs mending. 
There is money enough in the world to afford every 
one a reasonable sufficiency for all their necessities, 
and for plenty of luxuries, as well. Why it should 
require such a ceaseless grind for most persons to get 
but a very moderate portion of it and at the expense 
of so much time and thought, is a problem that every- 
body should work at until it is solved once for all. 
The getting of sufficient money for the comfort and 
happiness of every household should be a reasonable, 
joyous, sure process for every man that is not seri- 
ously handicapped or criminally unworthy. It 
should be seen to that this gets to be the case, and 
at a time not very far removed. 

But yet, it must be said, the real difficulty begins 
when the time for spending comes. Whether the in- 
come be a dollar a day or any number of dollars, the 
principles governing expenditure are the same, and 
always the same. So far as possible, one should 



GETTING AND SPENDING 381 

spend less than is earned, spend chiefly for things of 
permanent worth rather than transitory, spend ac- 
cording to one's real self and its real needs rather 
than for impressing the world, spend so as to gain 
rather than lose, — these are the principles that ap- 
ply to prince and pauper alike, and the violation of 
which is sure to bring failure and discomfort and 
disease in its train. In this respect there is no 
chance or " luck " any more than there is in respect 
of anything else. To over-spend, to buy for the day 
only, to spend for show, to spend destructively, bring 
their sure results in folly, pain and disappointment ; 
from these there is no escape, gamble with the matter 
as skilfully as one may. 

This shows that spending is an art as well as get- 
ting; an art, moreover, that should be learned by 
everyone quite as truly the one as the other. If it 
is thought wise to afford years of schooling and 
training to prepare for earning a living, why is it 
not thought quite as reasonable to suppose that it 
may take just as long a time and just as much skil- 
ful education to learn how to spend satisfactorily 
that which is at any time earned? A little sense here 
would save to most persons much more that is for 
their real advantage, than the added income that 
they so greedily desire. 

If one attempts to think of this matter of spending 
one's income somewhat in detail, the first thing that 
appears desirable is that expenditure should first be 
for actual needs. Wholesome food rather than trashy 
substitutes, suitable clothing rather than " fashion- 
able," a practical home rather than a showy house 
and grounds, more comfortable and more tasteful 



382 HIGHER LIVING 

furniture, better tools and implements, such addi- 
tional outlays as the betterment of one's calling ne- 
cessitates, — all these are basic, and should come 
rigidly before expenditure for unnecessary luxuries 
and encumbrances. Not that an occasional expendi- 
ture for " foolishness " is to be seriously decried at 
all; not this, but rather that such folly shall never 
become the rule and so endanger both the person 
and his possessions at once. And especially should 
judgment and control be exercised in discriminating 
between needs and wants. Many a man has ruined 
his health and character and lost his hold by falsely 
judging that his condition needed the occasional 
glass of stimulant. Many a woman has ruined the 
prospect of her whole household by judging that her 
social position required undue increase of expendi- 
ture for clothes and ornaments and entertaining. 
Many a couple has eventually gone under because of 
ill-judged " vacations " and " rests " and other simi- 
lar unnecessary deviations from the regular course 
of life. Many a household has been mortgaged and 
perhaps lost, in order to make ill-judged contribu- 
tions to schemes that were but remotely concerned 
to the spenders. Many a family has itself been 
" turned turtle " by the automobile that they judged 
to be so essential to their health or happiness. 
Many a social climber has been seen to fall to serious 
disaster, simply because the means used were dispro- 
portionate to the skill displayed in using them, Now 
all this may be rightly considered as but little short 
of criminal disregard of the actual needs of self and 
dependents. It should seldom if ever be considered 
right over much to spend for wants before needs have 



GETTING AND SPENDING 383 

been rightly supplied, or to spend for the present 
without due regard to the future. A young couple 
starting out hand in hand upon life's rough journey, 
have, barring accidents, their destiny almost abso- 
lutely in their own hands, at least so far as getting 
and spending are concerned. Pity indeed is it, that 
so many suffer such a shipwreck of fortune and fame 
as is so commonly seen. Pity is it likewise, that so 
little is said and taught and required concerning this 
important subject. A school for learning the art of 
proper expenditure, at which every young man and 
woman should be required to attend, is one of the 
profoundest general needs of the day. 

With getting and spending comes the matter of 
saving and investing. How it has come to be that 
the altogether greater bulk of the money in the world 
is to be found in the hands of comparatively few 
people is simple enough as soon as one thinks that 
some persons have the money-getting instinct and 
others have it not. I know a man who, out of nine 
shillings a day, supported a large and increasing 
family and saved enough first to buy a lot and then 
to put up a simple house. Of course they all had to 
deny themselves pretty much everything in order to 
do this ; but a prouder and happier family never was 
seen than when finally they all crowded into the little 
home — their home — that was " all paid for," too, 
and by their own energy and skill. Beside this man 
there lived another, who on three dollars a day could 
not support his family of three and lay up anything 
at all. In fact he was always in debt, and he never 
knew where his money went to. Nor can it be said 
that the lives of himself and his family were to be 



884 HIGHER LIVING 

compared with those of his neighbor for health, com- 
fort or happiness. Concretely speaking, these 
neighbors are no exceptions. To him that hath the 
instinct to saving and expending for permanent val- 
ues, shall it be given what he looks forward to, and 
with not many exceptions. From him that hath not 
this qualification, it shall be taken away that which 
he already hath. These two bits of instruction are 
written indelibly on every page of financial history. 

Between getting money and spending it there 
should always be a margin that should be perma- 
nently invested in the best possible way. For many 
this best possible way will appear to be a better home 
and all that goes with this ; for others, more extensive 
landed property ; for others still, extension of busi- 
ness ; for others, securities based upon supposed 
actual values. For many the time may come when 
justification for a better home and a more luxurious 
expenditure in general will be ample and right. For 
others some other form of permanent investment of 
surplus will be sought. This to be satisfactory must 
be based on certain well-recognized principles as to 
safety and return. In the first place, the security 
should be real and ample. No ordinary person has 
any business to invest his savings in wild-cat specu- 
lative schemes, glibly " promoted " by adroit exploit- 
ers of ignorance and credulity. The security itself 
should show that it is ample, that it has been legally 
secured and offered, and its base intelligently and 
prosperously managed and likely to be worth as much 
at maturity as at any time before. Besides all this, 
it should be offered and recommended by a house of 
long-established, successful reputation, one so or-i 



GETTING AND SPENDING S85 

ganized that it will probably be perpetuated along 
the same reliable lines, at least during the lifetime of 
the security, and that gives evidence in every trans- 
action that it believes and means what it says. If 
such a house makes mistakes, they are reasonable 
ones and within necessary human limits as to under- 
standing and judgment. I have known of such 
houses making mistakes amounting to many thou- 
sands of dollars ; and yet, to save their customers 
from loss, simply because of certain settled princi- 
ples that govern all their transactions, shoulder all 
the loss themselves. If one loses his savings at the 
hands of such a house, he can at least console him- 
self with the thought that he has not been sillily fool- 
ish. 

If again the choice of investment has been land, 
the same principle holds as before. The land should 
be rightly located, well-adapted to the purposes to 
which it is to be put, and as secure against claimants 
and dangers of every kind as intelligence and good 
judgment can see. A long-ago acquaintance ex- 
changed in winter time his own ancestral farm for 
one thought to be better located ; but when spring 
came he found himself possessed mostly of sand- 
banks that scarcely compensated for improvement in 
locality. If branching out in business seems to be 
the investment called for, no sounder word can be 
spoken than that, clear hindsight is no easy cor- 
rector of dull foresight. One of the most successful 
businesses that I ever knew was rightly located in 
the first place but in what soon proved to be a terri- 
bly cramped space ; yet in which it was built up and 
undeviatingly prosecuted for fifty years, and is still 



386 HIGHER LIVING 

prosperous in the same old narrow quarters. Gen- 
erations have gotten rich, and generations will get 
rich, out of space that most men would now sneer at 
as being contemptibly inadequate. Spreading out a 
prosperous business does not always insure a corre- 
sponding increase of prosperity by any means ; while 
the harassing and the trembling and the overwork 
and the eternal slaving that so frequently goes with 
this serious mistake, is indeed a painful prelude to 
the crash that eventually comes. In business, the 
little boats that ought to keep near shore never make 
much by aping the greater ones that have been built 
for wider ventures. And men are much like boats, 
in this respect. And so it is with investing extra 
funds in larger homes and finer. Better look ahead 
and with sharp eyes before entering upon a rather 
speculative enterprise like this. Much as the more 
expensive house may seem to be the one thing needed 
to make life comfortably successful, it may prove 
nevertheless to be the millstone that will never cease 
hanging about the neck until death itsef brings re- 
lease ; — or even not then, for the succeeding genera- 
tion may have to bear on and on the burden that 
grinds and shows no mercy. Of all the follies of in- 
vestment, the one almost the most reprehensible is 
that of building so large a home that, as soon as the 
children have flown, it will seem as empty as space 
itself and as difficult to maintain as miscalculation 
either abstract or concrete. A professional friend 
of mine, when asked why he didn't retire, replied: 
" I cannot ; I have too big and expensive an estab- 
lishment to maintain." And yet he was near to 



GETTING AND SPENDING 387 

threescore years old, and dangerously worn with his 
unceasing work and worry. 

So we are led to say that, in every instance, the 
successful investor of much or little money is bound 
to be intelligent, reasonable, cautious, far-seeing and 
chiefly sacrificing of present wants to future needs. 
Nor in any sense can this course rightly interfere 
with the actual comfort and enjoyment of life that 
one should unhesitatingly aspire to. We all have a 
right to enj oy life as we go along, undoubtedly ; but 
it is precautionary to remember that not every prom- 
ise of fulfillment in this respect is certain of success, 
by any means. Here is a field in which the princi- 
ples of Higher Living not only hold, but conquer to 
the uttermost in this practical world. Heedlessness 
here is scarcely ever so excusable as common report 
would have it. The need for universal instruction 
and training in the art of living has growing need to 
be exercised at least as fully as the art of getting a 
living. Right getting and right spending assure a 
prosperity that can be depended upon. 



CHAPTER XXIX 
AS THE YEARS ADVANCE 



I am peaceful as old age to-night, 

I regret little, I would change still less. 

ROBERT BROWNING 

Things of a day! what are we? what are we not? 
Man is a shadow, a dreamer. But when the glory of 
victory has come, the gift of heaven, then the clear light 
rests on men, and there is life serene. pindar 

Once more let God's green earth and sunset our 
old feelings awaken; 
Through weary years of toil and strife and ill, 
O, let me feel that my good angel still 

Hath not his trust forsaken. 

JOHN G. WHITTIER 

As you are old and reverend, you should be wise. 

SHAKESPEARE 

But an old-age serene and bright, 
And lovely as a Lapland night, 
Shall lead thee to thy grave. 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

I grieve not that ripe knowledge takes away 
The charm that Nature to my childhood wore, 
For, with that insight, cometh, day by day, 
A greater bliss than wonder was before. 

MATTHEW ARNOLD 

The fact is, in our spiritual life we already possess 
him, are fle'sh of his flesh, are one with him. Just in 
so far as we have validity, courage, loyalty, wealth, 
strength, sanity of will and understanding, we know him 
just as much as we are. And we are him just so much 
as we are morally worthy to be. josiah royce 



CHAPTER XXIX 
AS THE YEARS ADVANCE 

As the years advance, the time comes when the 
energy and suppleness and ambitions of younger 
days are felt somewhat ominously to be dying down, 
and the outlook to be mostly into the days of the 
" sere and yellow leaf " of autumnal decline. The 
old habits of impulse rise to less and less imperious 
heights ; inclination becomes less keen and fascinat- 
ing ; conquests less desirable, earthly fears and hopes 
not so definite, and additional experience of any 
kind not so desirable. Old slippers and gowns come 
to feel the easier, old habits the more comfortable, 
old opinions and books and politics and religion and 
eatables more and more acceptable, and old friends 
the best of all. In fact, if we are honest with our- 
selves, we see that we are really growing old, and 
soon must give way to those that naturally follow. 
Happy are we, if we do not get to feel like Ibsen's 
" Master Builder," who declared, " it seems as 
though a crushing debt rested upon me and weighed 
me down " ; or if we are not forced to crouch because 
of " the younger generation that stands ready to 
knock at my door " as he said, " to make an end of 
Harvard Solness," but let ourselves slide out into 
the quieter waters of life without jealousy and do 
not begrudge our successors their places, in turn. 

In order to be thus resigned and comfortable, how- 
391 



392 HIGHER LIVING 

ever, we should first endeavor to reserve for this 
fatal period the best bodily condition and habits that 
we possibly can. Good digestion and secretion are 
indispensable to these later-days' comfort, and brook 
no substitute by way of artificial stimulation or 
tonic, whatsoever. Equally necessary likewise are 
good intelligence and right thinking, if the best of 
old age is to be enjoyed. Mere entertainment by 
outsiders or outside show fails very noticeably in 
comparison with that which comes from a hearty 
mentality, heartily exercised. And so is it with re- 
spect to right feeling and right disposition, and with 
right outlook upon the narrowing future. Those 
whose every moment is filled with thoughts and ex- 
pressions of the love that is divine, have little fear 
of anything now or hereafter. To be in harmony 
with the Supreme nature of all, is to feel safe and 
trusting evermore ; is to 

" only know 
I cannot drift beyond His loving care," 

is to look at the sunset clouds and see only the glory 
there so generously emblazoned. 

Growing old is a process that is much more largely 
determined by original condition and life-long prac- 
tices than by the number of years one has lived. If 
it is true that at any given time we are " Just as old 
as our arteries," so is it equally true that we are 
as old as the functioning of any other one of our 
general systems. Not only the arterial but the di- 
gestive, the excretory, the nervous, the glandular, 
the generative systems show, each in turn, how near 
to the terminus we actually are at any given period 



AS THE YEARS ADVANCE 393 

of our lives. This fact must raise to a higher im- 
portance our considerations of all the earlier por- 
tions of life. Early malnutrition and disease, youth- 
ful dissipation, adolescent depressions and false steps, 
adult over-work, over-worry and other bad habits, 
disregard of tendencies and reckless gambling with 
health possibilities, all prepare the way for the ad- 
vance of old age correspondingly long before the 
normal term of years. And back of this is of course 
the original constitution with its predispositions and 
tendencies that has been given by ancestry. There 
is nothing mysterious about the fact that one per- 
son is old early and another late. In each case it 
comes about absolutely in obedience to laws, which 
it is still the world's shame that it knows so inac- 
curately and disobeys so heedlessly even when rightly 
known. 

But one thing is certain : Early or late, abnor- 
mally weak or crippled or otherwise, hopeless or 
abounding in faith, satisfied or not, the demands of 
Higher Living are just as pressing upon advanced 
age, as ever. In this there is no legitimate respite, 
nor should there be expectation of any, even in ex- 
ceptional cases. Self-indulgence should not be un- 
reasonable because of age any more than because of 
the want of it. For as age advances it is the influ- 
ence upon others that tells the most of all. Rosy, 
cheery, agile, optimistic old men or women are sure 
to scatter blessings wherever they go, and the world 
grows better under their bright radiance, whether 
they design it, or not. Everyone should think of 
this possibility of the last decades of life, and begin 
early to train themselves to realize it when in turn 



394 HIGHER LIVING 

the time for them has come. Much of the whining 
and the grouchiness and the pessimism of old age is 
but the cultivation of habits of body and mind, be- 
gun years before. It is often pitiful to note how 
these habits have come so to dominate certain per- 
sons, that they themselves and everybody else arc 
kept constantly in a state of misery that is inde- 
scribable, yet so horribly real. Much of the so- 
called " childishness " of old age is but the perpetua- 
tion of a childishness that has never been grown out 
of at any time before. Hard to deal with is this, 
undoubtedly. The profitable time to deal with it be- 
gan with babyhood and has continued ever since. 
No person should let these pernicious misery-produc- 
ing habits either to grow or to become permanent. 
This is a personal duty as imperative and useful as 
it is obvious and commendable. 

One of the sources of trouble in old age is the 
vacuous mind or the trivial content of mind that has 
been allowed to develop. It takes just as truly fore- 
sight and rightly-directed energy here, as earlier in 
life. No person, as old age approaches, should let 
empt3 r -mindedness or trivial-mindedness become domi- 
nant. True, many of the former occupations and 
strains should, one by one, be laid aside, and an in- 
creasing amount of time be given to rest and peace 
of mind and body. No one should attempt to carry 
into this period the strenuous life that has been both 
creation and salvation heretofore. One by one the 
labors and the stresses should be given over to the 
younger generation ; but this does not require that 
lazy, non-occupation should follow. Labor without 
strain and kept within normal bounds is always ap- 



AS THE YEARS ADVANCE 395 

propriate, even unto the latest possible day. As 
j^oungest children should as soon as possible have 
their little tasks dutifully to be done, so should the 
patriarchs have their appropriate work and care 
until the end. The old age that is simply rest and 
vacuity is discontented and self-destructive. The 
strength and faculties that still remain need now 
as at any time to be appropriately exercised in or- 
der to insure the greatest satisfactions of mind and 
body. The muscles need some exercise always ; the 
intellect needs to grapple with something, no less ; 
the emotions to be stirred, if gently; the will to be 
timely and regularly exercised; and the spirit to be 
exercised in helpful enterprises, every day at least 
so long as possible. 

To this end the garden, the woodpile, the care of 
animals, and the like, or the knitting, the sewing, the 
dusting, and the like, may each in its place serve as 
acceptably as usefully. And if to this, a reasonable 
amount of appropriate reading, suitable companion- 
ship, entertaining conversation, short journeyings, 
fresh scenes, new studies, hearty interests and zests 
are added from time to time, no old age need pain- 
fully decline for want of the occupation that con- 
serves while it stimulates or gives tone. Yet to this 
should be added also the sedulous cultivation of the 
spiritual qualities, without which old age may indeed 
be dark. Our fathers and mothers read their Bibles, 
said their prayers in company or alone, talked about 
holy things frequently, educated their children in 
religious matters at their knees, and felt the consola- 
tions of religion correspondingly. They probably 
lived much closer to the fount of spirituality than 



396 HIGHER LIVING 

their children, and we have need to return to some of 
their customs, if we would reap their Godly rewards. 
If we are to be holy-minded we must keep in touch 
with the Source of holiness, even throughout old age. 
One can see no substitute for this, intelligent along 
many lines as we have now become. A readiness and 
determination to keep close hold of the hand of 
Creative Energy, to rest our hearts on His fatherly 
one, to trust that He doeth all things well, no matter 
how contrariwise to our short sight it may seem, to 
approach the Source of Spiritual Energy frequently 
and long in most earnest communion, to dwell in 
thought upon both the scientific aspects of creation 
and the scope of moral and religious opportunity 
that is afforded us, to hope on, hope ever, and to 
grow in the faith, that the excellence of what has been 
is sufficient assurance that henceforth all will be well 
— all this is as necessary to the well-being of old 
age, as it ought to be useful to persons of any age. 
Those who have breasted the years of experience 
successfully, ought to remember how much they were 
helped or could have been helped simply by the timely 
expression on the part of others of the trust that 
saves and inspires, and endeavor to perpetuate so 
useful a custom with all their remaining strength. 
Failure here is doubly disastrous ; it cheats the 
young of- its best inheritance, and it impoverishes the 
old who should still be growing in grace, none the less 
steadily. 

Old age ought to be as peaceful and serene as ap- 
proaching normal sleep; ought to be as trustful as 
the babe in its mother's lap ; ought to be as well-mean- 
ing and loving as the Father himself; ought to be 



AS THE YEARS ADVANCE 397 

as helpful as ever before ; ought to " glide adown 
life's stream " and see never a frightening shoal or 
rock ahead. If Higher Living has been a reality 
that has persistently influenced the life from the 
cradle, or long before, on, there is no question that 
old age and the terminus itself will have no shadow 
of fear or pain worth noting; will have no question 
either that, as it looks 

" On life's fair picture of delight/' 
it can expect triumphantly to say later on, 

" My heart's content would find it right." 
Whenever it shall 

" Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime/' 

then it will surely hear the same voice whisper 

" Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right onward drive unharmed; 
The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
And every wave is charmed." 



CHAPTER XXX 
THE GLORIOUS HOPE 



Serene and mild the untried light 

May have its dawning; 
And, as in summer's northern night 
The evening and the dawn unite, 
The sunset hues of time blend with 
the soul's new morning. 

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

It has been good to be here, and it will be good to go 
hence; we know not whence we came, nor whither we 
go; were not consulted as to our coming, and shall not 
be as to our going; it is all for "the glory of God"; 
though we must use this phrase in a larger sense than 
the cramped interpretation of the theologian. 

JOHN BURROUGHS 

Far oii thou art, but ever nigh ; 

I have thee still, and I rejoice; 

I prosper, circled with thy voice; 
I shall not lose thee tho' I die. 

ALFRED TENNYSON 

O years ! and Age ! Farewell : 

Behold I go 

Where I do know 
Infinite to dwell, 
And these mine eyes shall see 

All times how they 

Are lost i' th' Sea 
Of vast Eternitie. Robert herrick 

You may no longer see the mystical beauty, the sub- 
limity of the dead face, but out of the farther past the 
living eyes will look ... a face from an evanescent 
semblance will flash a radiance into the place where her 
face, his face, is in your heart and restore it to your 

Vision. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 



CHAPTER XXX 

THE GLORIOUS HOPE 

As one dares to look beyond the moment when he 
shall be pronounced " dead," a conflict of emotions 
is apt to possess him and render him either despond- 
ent and timid or courageous and elated, as he has 
been wont seriously to regard his earlier superstitious 
teachings or his later, reasonable ones. If he is still 
speculating as to whether he is to " be saved " or not, 
and whether he has accepted the reputed " means " of 
salvation and tried with all his might dutifully to 
live by them, he is apt, in these modern days, to be 
disturbed by many a doubt that has come to him 
from his contact with life and from the instruction 
that has impressed him as he has read in the litera- 
ture of the times. Seldom is it possible for the in- 
telligent reading man or woman of today to have 
such an unmodified, unvitiated faith in ancient " rev- 
elation " as our fathers had. Something has come 
into the modern mind that obscures its ultimate con- 
ception of God and providence and salvation, and 
has not as yet very widely been superseded by ideas 
of intelligibility, rationality and assured fact. Few, 
besides the so-called " free religionists," are now able 
to be absolutely happy as they look over the black 
line into the fields beyond. Everyone wishes to know 
more about it before he enters upon the " great ad- 
venture," and shrinks from the uncertainty that be- 

401 



402 HIGHER LIVING 

sets him as life has taught him to shrink from all 
kinds of ignorance and presumption. 

Now it seems to me that the students and disciples 
of Higher Living, if they have been true to the light 
that they have seen, need have no such timidity and 
despondency whatever. As they have come through 
the days and hours, they must have become more 
and more assured that, behind all that is seen or 
thought of or imagined there is a Supreme Power 
and Wisdom and Goodness that, inasmuch as He 
has brought everything so wonderfully to pass thus 
far, He will continue to do wonderfully well unto all 
eternity. It would seem as if one must become joy- 
ous, trusting, expectant of the best, just as soon as 
the significance of the lessons of Higher Living is 
once appreciated and incorporated into one's daily 
life. From that moment, all the higher, nobler, finer 
aims of life must prosper no matter how everything 
else goes. Not only is the Supreme Being felt as 
a competent, wise, all-sufficient power, but the self- 
hood within is felt so closely allied, that ultimate 
failure is impossible. 

" Enough now, if the Right 
And Good and Infinite 
Be named here^ as thou calledst thy hand thine own." 

The Vine is felt to support the branches now, and 
to be able to sustain them until all fruitage of the 
spirit is developed. It becomes clear that with every 
prompting spiritward, every thought and act in re- 
sponse thereto, has been growing the immortal 
within us at a corresponding rate, and that to ever}' 
extent of stature to which we have arrived, we are 



THE GLORIOUS HOPE 403 

as sure of the future as of the past or present. 
It is the divine spirit within, actuating every con- 
ception, prompting or act that is immortal; the 
body we are to leave behind, but we are to take 
with us the glorious fruitage of every sweet thought, 
every kindly deed, every joyous hope, every wave 
of disinterested love, every prayer for all mankind, 
none the less. The body has a space limit, a time 
limit. The spirit is an ever-living expansion, fel- 
lowship and fulfilling of heavenly desire. The one 
plagues us with its demand for materialization and 
tangibility; the other assures us by its own suffi- 
ciency for the life eternal. It makes certain when 
all else is painfully speculative and unpromising. 

Yes, this is The Glorious Hope that is naturally 
developed in the minds and hearts of the disciples 
of Higher Living. Looking beyond the grave, they 
see a continuing of all that has been finest and 
noblest in their lives. They know that the secret 
key that will unlock eternity for them, is the love 
they have borne their brethren met in the way. 
They know that their love for others is akin to the 
love of God — is of him, from him, by him. Like 
the coalescence of drops in the universal sea, the 
love-fount of one's nature is drawn to the Father 
heart and there is satisfied. Divine love is to be 
found the same hereafter as now. Our legacy is 
of it and the life it transforms. 

" We know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air, 
We only know we cannot drift 
' Beyond his love and care." 



4 °4 HIGHER LIVING 

We here find that all the Teachers in the world's 

a^T <?7 teStlfied t0 tHis in thdr —1 -ays 
and the finding strengthens and cheers and urges us 

™ r S6 ^ ° Ur fellows -°ur joint heirs 

-grow mellow and poised and inspiring, and this 
encourages us because we are of their kind and 
can follow where they have gone. We have seen 
the smile of death as it lightened up the faces of our 
loved ones, and we too would go like them to our 
glorious realization soothed and sustained by an un- 
alterable trust and like them smilingly on the way. 
We too have had fore-gleams and advance persua- 
sions of what is awaiting us, and our spirits long 
to realize it m God's good time, even while we must 
aw ai t the coming of our fellows to enjoy it with us. 
Our Glorious Hope is thus as much of a present 
tact as anything we conceive of. It leads us on 
and on over every obstacle and through every dark- 
ness ,— on with the beacon-light ever in view and 
undimmed. Higher Living has prepared us to an- 
ticipate Glorious Realizations, even as it has ful- 
filled its promises heretofore. 

And as the last moment comes, how sweet again 
to run home to Our Father, to lean our tired hearts 
upon His, to hear His welcome of well done, to feel 
His life w,thout obstruction, radiating into our own 
vitality, to know Him even as He has known us, 
from everlasting to everlasting. Blessed moment 
ot transition from cumbering materiality to abso- 
lutely free immortality — blessed moment of re- 
ward for all the patience, perseverance and undy- 
ing expectancy that has made us meet for it 
Blessed ! Blessed ! ! 

H 149 82 «' 



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